Peripeteia in Slow Motion

The fifth JEF novel from Frederick Mark Kramer, extending a Manhattan cycle the press has been publishing since 2011: Apostrophe/Parenthesis, Ambiguity, Meanwhile, Passions and Shadows or Shadows and Passions, and now this one. Five novels across fourteen years, all set in or radiating from a single consciousness moving through New York.

Peripeteia in Slow Motion is one morning. Art, life, and sexual fantasy held in a single ruminating interior, the day's small motions thinking themselves out at length. The form is borrowed from the European high-modernist line Kramer has worked in throughout the cycle, Musil's Man Without Qualities in particular, and from late Beckett: dense interior monologue, recursive musical structure, present-tense New York voice.

The reversal the title names is internal and slow; the book stays where the mind is and lets the city press in around it.