Hard to know what to say about this slim book which, at less than 150 pages, still feels dense. It is divided into three sections that are all clearly connected but also feel distinct and, while they tie in together, each seem to be saying something different about the relationships between the characters.
In our first section we have a man travelling to visit his mentor. Thomas is elderly now and (maybe) increasingly forgetful, but still an influential figure. The narrator is a busy family man, bringing with him his own history and concerns. He plans to interview Thomas – a sort of final interview at the end of Thomas’ illustrious career – but he drops his phone in the hotel sink and it stops working. For reasons that are unclear but also surprisingly understandable, he goes to Thomas’ house and conducts the interview as if it is being recorded, without confessing to Thomas that he has no means of doing so.
We get hints at Thomas’ strained relationship with his son Max, who may also be a friend of this man who isn’t recording. Then we jump into the narrator’s past, his early relationship with his wife and the strange connection he makes with a friend of hers. The final section of the book focuses on Max and we see a slightly different perspective on Thomas and very little of our initial narrator.
None of this is fully fleshed out. There are a lot of gaps in the narration, a lot that we as the reader are required to guess at or embellish. It’s frustrating in several places but also feels honest to what real relationships are, especially ones that have lasted years and decades. Especially the complexities of familial relationships. Lerner drops this all in the reader’s lap and leaves it up to us to make of it what we will. There’s both a lot here and also not at all enough. It’s frustrating and intriguing. I’m not sure this style could have been sustained over a full-length novel but I also was definitely left wanting more.
The blurb on the front page and the title of the book itself lays a lot of weight on this element of the interview being unrecorded and this comes back around in an interesting way in the final section. But that isn’t really what the story is about. Or at least, that’s not the main tension of these snippets. Maybe it’s more accurately a story about what we say and don’t say, and how that might be altered if we know our statements will remain in some form after we ourselves are gone.
Karissa Reads Books 