In Ben Lerner's novel, the unnamed narrator travels to Providence, Rhode Island, to conduct what is to be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a towering figure in the arts, a man who seems to speak from the future and the past at once and to "reenchant the air" when he talks. But on arriving, the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, destroying his only recording device—and then finds himself mysteriously unable to admit this to Thomas as the interview begins. From that dreamlike premise Lerner spins a story that is at once an intimate drama about the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a meditation on the technologies, digital and literary, through which we store, transmit, or erase memory and connection. The novel is haunted by Kafka—there are deliberate echoes of "The Judgment" and "A Hunger Artist"—yet its texture is thoroughly contemporary, preoccupied with smartphones, recording, transcription, and the fragility of the record we keep of one another. Lerner, a poet and the author of Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, again works in the autofictional, essayistic mode that has become his signature, blending narrative with reflection on art, mediation, and the self. Short and concentrated, the book turns a small mishap into an occasion for probing how memory is preserved or lost, what interviews and recordings do to the people they capture, and what, in the end, only a work of fiction can record. It is a lyric, mysterious, and formally inventive addition to Lerner's body of work.