Essay Questions

How does the narrator's short story "The Golden Vanity" mirror the narrator's own life?

The narrator is a struggling writer working on adapting the story "The Golden Vanity" into a full-length novel. Interestingly, "The Golden Vanity" is itself about an author who's trying to adapt a short story of his into a full-length novel, directly paralleling the narrator's life. There are many more similarities: almost all of the characters in "The Golden Vanity" are alternate-reality versions of people who exist in the narrator's life. The narrator's beautiful yet emotionally distant girlfriend, Alena, appears in the story as Hannah. The friendly couple who works with Alena and introduced him to her, Jon and Sharon, are there as well, represented as Josh and Mary. His best friend/unreciprocated love interest, Alex, is in the story as Liza. The main character also has a health scare with a tumor found in relation to his wisdom tooth surgery, just like the narrator finds out that he has a potentially dangerous heart condition in the larger narrative. All of these similarities are meant to emphasize the fact that this is another representation of another reality of the narrator's life, a theme prevalent throughout the novel.

What does Lerner's interjection about this book being "on the very edge of fiction" mean?

Many readers have interpreted this phrase, "on the very edge of fiction," as being self-praise, indicating that the author believes his work to be at the forefront of development in fictional literature and artistic vision. This certainly seems like a reasonable interpretation, as the novel's themes are rather progressive and postmodern in their complexity of the mundane; the author's use of highbrow and unnecessarily grandiloquent language, moreover, makes him appear to be the sort of person who would praise his own book in such a way.

There is, however, an alternate interpretation of this quote. The author calls it "on the very edge of fiction," and this could be referring to the line of division between fiction and nonfiction. The author has admitted to this book being at least semi-autobiographical, so being "on the very edge of fiction" could mean "just barely off the edge of nonfiction." So many of these stories and fictional elements could directly reference the author's life, making them almost true, or perhaps the author believes so strongly in his own creation and/or theory of alternating realities that he believes the story to be true even if it doesn't refer to himself. Either way, perhaps this quote has dual meanings, so both the first and seconds interpretations are correct. Lerner certainly seems like the type of author who would do that.