Art Uber Alles

A WRITER'S WIT
A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
Marguerite Yourcenar
Born June 8, 1903

New Yorker Summer Fiction 2016

Each summer The New Yorker magazine publishes several short stories in a single issue. The implication is that one will tuck this issue under one's arm, take it to the beach, and read it from cover to cover. I wish. This profile of Ben Lerner's story is the second in a series of four. —RJ

Ben Wiseman

June 6 and 13, 2016, Ben Lerner, “The Polish Rider”: Sonia, in the act of retrieving two paintings from her gallery owner so that she can clean them up before a show, leaves them behind in an Uber car and spends most of the story attempting to re-retrieve them. ¶ Lerner seems to insert himself as character/narrator of this story: a writer who is attempting to help the polish immigrant Sonia, among other things, navigate the nasty waters of Manhattan Uber riding. Lerner-as-narrator touches a lot bases to create this breathless narrative: how he and Sonia are the same age, he being from Topeka, she from Krakow; how he is a writer, she a visual artist; how art history informs both their lives; the fact that Sonia’s entire oeuvre is based on the image of the famous kiss between Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev—an image she has created variations of over and over again.

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The reader senses they will not locate the lost (stolen?) paintings. What seems most important is how cold, cold, cold life still is (and always will be) for struggling artists, particularly in New York City—and how petty theft and the bureaucratic ineptitude of a fairly recent start-up only exacerbates that cold, cold life. Lerner’s most recent book is The Hatred of Poetry.
Illustration by Ben Wiseman.

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