More on Lerner

I'm thinking that in ten or fifteen years Ben Lerner might write a big novel somewhat like the one I just read by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles' ---Where Tigers Are at Home  which won France's 2008 Prix Medicis.  Similar poetic sensibilities at work.  Layerings of various voices and characters and time frames.  More anthropology than Lerner will get into, but he can replace that with his attentions to cultural events and behaviors.  Where Lerner has Whitman for the historial base, Blas de Robles has Athanasius Kircher.  That gives the book a narrative thread around which the contemporary events are embroidered.