Presner the Remarkable

Nonpracticing lawyer and wannabe playwright Presner works the night shift at a local newsstand (and enjoys it) while waiting for his life to happen. Present, but not very present, in his life are his law school friends, whose lives have all moved forward while Presner deals (somewhat) with the loss of his family of origin. The closest of these friends, Fitz, is there for him when he needs it but swindles the rest of the gang, leaving Presner to patch things up before one group member’s wedding.

Literary prose, largely confined to Presner’s inward-looking, intellectualized interior world, is both ruminative and meandering. Driven by character rather than plot, the story owes much of its tenor to Chekhov and is written in five parts (akin to five acts). It’s an excellent framework for a character who wants his life to change yet can’t quite make it happen. The derailed career, unrealized artistic ambition, stuttering love life, and family loss all echo the lives of Chekhov’s frustrated, yearning protagonists.

Presner has sustained enormous grief, losing both parents tragically and his sister to an illness during which he served as her caregiver. It’s the kind of trauma capable of calcifying a life and then carving a new identity out of someone struck and stalled by extraordinary loss. Eron comes closest to hanging the story on this hook in Part II, following Presner’s walk through his sister’s illness, but stops short of fully turning the spotlight on the impact this complicated grief journey has on his life’s trajectory (if it has one) and the ways profound loss can reshape a life.

Presner is, by design, an ordinary man. An almost-lawyer, almost-playwright, and almost-boyfriend, he lives a life much like that of most people. He’s orphaned in the world, save for a handful of connections to law school friends and a perennially romance-adjacent woman from an adult continuing-education acting class. The reader is kept wondering, “Where is he going, and will he ever pull it off?” The novel’s deliberate literary stasis is clearly a reflection of its protagonist’s mindset, though that same quality may leave some readers at a distance from Presner.