PRESNER THE REMARKABLE

Presner’s life since law school has not been what he hoped it would be. He’s spent the last 13 years working the graveyard shift selling magazines and cigarettes at a 24-hour newsstand and chipping away at his long-unfinished play. His friends from law school have gone on to high-powered careers, including his nemesis, Gary Marx, who has become a prominent ambulance chaser. Presner has never really forgiven Marx for stealing his girlfriend during law school (or for the cheesy commercials—“Gary got me $20,000”—that have run on television for the last few years). When another old friend stops by the store to let Presner know that Marx is engaged, Presner can’t feel happy for him—even if he plans, like the rest of the old crowd, to attend the wedding. Presner hopes it will provide an opportunity to jump-start his life: He’ll ask his longtime crush, Lisa Caner, to be his date, and he’ll finish his play so he’ll have something to brag to everyone about. But the reunion does not turn out to be the triumph that Presner hopes for. The keystone member of the group—the reason they are a group at all—has always been Norman Fitzhugh. Ever since Fitz helped Presner’s sister, both legally and emotionally, during her battle with cancer 12 years earlier, Presner has considered the man his closest friend. But when it becomes apparent that Fitz has been mismanaging his friends’ money, Presner must figure out how to help vindicate the man—a job that will take all the tricks Presner learned in law school and all the empathy he’s learned as a playwright.

Eron’s prose captures Presner’s analytical, neurotic view of the world, with sentences folding in on themselves to accommodate stray thoughts and observations. Here he describes Presner’s unwillingness to show his play to his perennial crush, Lisa: “Since he’d met her, it was understood that she’d read his play when ready, when abandoned, to quote da Vinci (art’s never finished, but abandoned); even during their yearlong hiatus he had Caner in mind for this capacity—but now that he was sending it out Presner found himself demurring.” The novel unfolds slowly, with every incident filtered through its slacker protagonist’s self-deprecating, emotionally numbed commentary. Presner is like a latter-day Bellow or Roth protagonist, navigating evergreen crises of aging and failure; Eron updates this tradition with Gen X concerns about art and authenticity. The playwriting material feels slightly contrived (Chekhov comes up a lot, and the book is divided into five acts), but the legal material is quite inspired: In his relationship with the charming but untrustworthy Fitz, Presner is able to pick at the graces and flaws of the legal profession. The book may read like it was published in the 1990s, but plenty of it remains relatable to millennials entering midlife.