The title refers to the moment in the movie Back to the Future where Michael J Fox harnesses a lightning bolt to return to his real present.

Adam like Lerner has published one successful book, and is negotiating for a big advance on his second one, but ends up unsuccessful at meeting a necessary deadline. Here he is involved with two women, one a nearly entirely platonic friend with whom he has agreed to father a child by artificial insemination, and the other a real girlfriend who knows how to manipulate him. The time sequence in the coming-of-age of Lerner’s alter-ego Adam Gordon is checkered, most of the narrative here taking place in Brooklyn and Manhattan probably subsequent to Adam’s mixed (cynical and self-searching) year in Spain described in Atocha. I was all set up for something explosively spectacular and gloriously coherent, and it wasn’t quite there. They are all overtly autobiographical, playfully self-referential, charmingly colloquial, and well-written and complex enough to hold interest, but for me repetitive in their tendency to build optimistic excitement at the start but not quite to deliver on expectation somewhere about halfway through. The three books are Leaving the Atocha Station, this one, and The Topeka School. This is the second of a “trilogy” by this fortyish author, who turned without exclusion from poetry to fiction in about 2011 and has had plenty of success in both genres.

10 04 ben lerner summary