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10:04 by Ben Lerner
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10:04 (original 2014; edition 2014)

by Ben Lerner, Eric Michael Summerer (Narrator)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
8723924,520 (3.65)41
"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from Leaving the Atocha Station's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious. cracklingly intelligent. and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives"--… (more)
Member:kevinyezbick
Title:10:04
Authors:Ben Lerner
Other authors:Eric Michael Summerer (Narrator)
Info:Dreamscape Media (2014), Edition: Unabridged, Audio CD
Collections:Read but unowned
Rating:***
Tags:audiobook, fiction, nyc, New York City, writers, artists, art scene, drugs, fertility, friendship, mentors, tutors, museums

Work Information

10:04 by Ben Lerner (2014)

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» See also 41 mentions

English (35)  Italian (1)  French (1)  Dutch (1)  All languages (38)
Showing 1-5 of 35 (next | show all)
This book was interesting because it was recursive, a novel about an author writing this novel. The story explores the roles of context and memory in our understanding of reality and fiction, and dabbles a bit with the values created by poetry and art in society. I never really got immersed in the story or cared much for or about the characters, but I enjoyed this book well enough. ( )
  JBarringer | Dec 15, 2023 |
Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is a poetic meditation on projection – through time and space, through thought and action, and through fiction and reality. It is a brilliant work, requiring careful readers to wrestle with the finely-detailed visions of Lerner’s own self-examinations.

I couldn’t help making comparisons to Don DeLillo and Nicholson Baker. DeLillo writes of urban individuals trying to make deeper connections to the world, and to each other. What does it mean to be a master financier who cloisters himself inwardly in a moving Manhattan limousine as his outer life crashes and burns? What does it mean to make one’s own life and body into a work of art?

What does it mean to remove yourself from the world – to seek a mutual abandonment of any such relationship with the outside – and yet find yourself forced to confront individuals who terrorize and demand the ultimate of it? And what does it mean when the world suffers a disaster? What is “the world”? What is “society”? At what point does a collection of individual people become a “society”? And how can such a vaguely-defined entity experience (the rest of) the world?

Lerner confronts many of these themes – self-cloistering, art as life / life as art, and shared-society disasters – but wonders more about how a person projects one’s self into the world, and how people act in, around and through the particulars.

And more fundamentally: What does it mean that moments advance through time? What does it mean that people advance though space? How do people interact through time, with time, against time, and in defiance of it? How do the artifacts of the world around us represent the results of past activity, or the promises of future results?

In “Mezzanine”, Nicholson Baker deconstructs a single act in such painfully excruciating but exuberantly brilliant detail that Proust himself would have needed to rest between chapters. Lerner is highly observant himself, and also quite keen to find connections between all manner of people, places and things.

But Lerner’s observations here are never as obsessive-compulsive as Baker’s in Mezzanine. They are deeply insightful, however, and lend support to his interest in illustrating the ways people project themselves through the many dimensions of the world.

The theme’s third leg is the exploration of fiction and reality. He discusses a book advance. His book advance. He prepares a treatment, and submits it to his publisher, but isn’t exactly sure he intends to finish it. (He writes many times of freely spending his advance on non-writing activities).

The book itself – meaning the one he has promised with questionable intent to the publisher – is a false epistolary document of the deleted email correspondence of the poet William Bronk, as if an executor had chosen, like Kafka’s, to publish the writings instead of burning them.

But his treatment of the material is problematic, not least of all because he's not even sure Bronk used email all that much. Nor is Lerner’s narrator too keen on solving the problems he faces. So he writes the current book instead. By which I mean this book, the one entitled 10:04. The one where he discusses writing it instead of the promised one.

Which makes this book a documentary of its own writing, and Lerner’s narrator an agent of himself! But wait! Lerner is spending so much of the book discussing fiction and reality that we need to wonder where the line is. There are passages in this book where I almost laughed out loud because I had completely forgotten which version of reality I was supposed to be keeping in mind at that point in the text.

As to plot, the book is certainly event-driven, and the characters do develop in time, but it is not strongly plotted nor dramatically structured. There is no climax as such, no denouement. Only plenty of drama. Navel-gazing, if you must.

Like DeLillo he starts the story at one point in time, and ends it at another, hopefully illustrating enough of his theme that the reader leaves satisfied. I’m not sure if I’m satisfied by the totality of the book – I don’t know that I put the book down after the last page and issued a final exhalation of satisfaction – but I am glad to have given thought to the issues Lerner raises, and I have a feeling I will return to this book again.

Lerner is a master craftsman of prose, and a fine turner of phrase. He is also a published poet, which may explain his facility with the language (tho I admit I entirely disliked the real-Ben-Lerner poem sandwiched inside the text at one point). This is both a writer’s-writer’s book and a reader’s-reader’s book. If you’re in either of those categories, it will be a great joy to read. ( )
  jvhovig | Aug 25, 2023 |
4.25 ( )
  jarrettbrown | Jul 4, 2023 |
Ben Lerner, the New York-based poet and author, fictionalizes experiences from his own life in this novel about "Ben," a New York-based poet and author, who is fictionalizing experiences from his own life to write a novel about a New York-based poet and author. What is true and what is fabricated, what is art and its purpose, what is actual past and what is possible future, all swirling against the exhausted background of late capitalism and the climate crisis. ( )
  GwenRino | Dec 5, 2021 |
Recommended to me by my college undergrad son, 10:04 is a kind of fiction that's outside of my usual wheelhouse, and, according to the author, not even entirely fiction. Lerner's story is really pretty interesting, though, written in an unconventional style and scattered effectively with photos and other illustrations that complement his ruminations on this strange time to be alive. I think Lerner's editor should have reined in his excessive fondness for the word proprioception, but otherwise, I'm intrigued, and eager to read more by this author. ( )
  CaitlinMcC | Jul 11, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 35 (next | show all)
Set in New York City, the story features an unnamed protagonist with a modicum of literary fame, a heart condition, and a best friend who needs his assistance to conceive a child. Though graciously contributing to the start of another life, the narrator is constantly aware of his own fragile existence. This vexing awareness of time forms the core of the novel. Whether wandering through dinosaur exhibits, ruminating over the Challenger explosion, or staring at the Marfa lights, our storyteller is continually musing on the triadic relationship of the present to the unknown past and the uncertain future. VERDICT An autoethnography that skillfully weaves Back to the Future, the brontosaurus, and Ronald Reagan into a narrative about living in the moment; highly recommended.
 
“Proprioception”: The narrator of Lerner’s knotty second novel returns often to that word. It refers to the sense of where one’s own body is in relation to things, a signature theme for an author who’s determined to pinpoint exactly where he is emotionally and philosophically.... “Proprioception”: The narrator of Lerner’s knotty second novel returns often to that word. It refers to the sense of where one’s own body is in relation to things, a signature theme for an author who’s determined to pinpoint exactly where he is emotionally and philosophically....Topic A remains whether his ambition will fully connect with his art.... Provocative and thoughtful, if at times wooly and interior.
added by Lemeritus | editKirkus Reviews (Jul 1, 2014)
 
Poet and novelist Lerner captures in beautiful and sometimes hilarious style the rhythms, dissonances, and ambiguities of a New York City set in... well, it's hard to say exactly when it is set, disorientation being one of the book's calculated effects.... This is a modern, very New York and unique literary novel.
added by Lemeritus | editBooklist (pay site) (Jul 1, 2014)
 
In his second novel, an associative, self-aware roman à clef that ably blends cultures high and low, Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station) explores the connections between contemporary life, art, and literary writing....Lerner’s insistence on showing off his skill and his display of syntactical acrobatics sometimes result in overwrought constructions that detract from the narrative momentum, but readers who can overlook the sluggish start will be rewarded with engaging streams of thought and moments of tenderness.
added by Lemeritus | editPublisher's Weekly (Jun 2, 2014)
 
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The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says that everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.
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The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.
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"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from Leaving the Atocha Station's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious. cracklingly intelligent. and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives"--

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