Meanwhile

Meanwhile is the third novel in Frederick Mark Kramer's New York cycle, after Apostrophe/Parenthesis and Ambiguity.

It follows Mario, a Jewish immigrant, navigating the city and reconciling with his past. The narrative method is the one the whole cycle runs on: dense interior monologue, recursive musical structure, the European high-modernist tradition (Musil, Beckett, the French nouveau roman) carried forward in a present-tense New York voice.

Across five novels and counting, the cycle builds the same instrument and turns it on the same city: a single consciousness held inside one continuous sentence-line, the city's noise and history pulled in through the consciousness rather than narrated around it. Meanwhile is the book where Mario carries the instrument, and the conversation between immigrant interior and Manhattan exterior is what the prose is.