10:04

The way Lerner, nominally a poet, writes prose is impossible to properly describe. I very much enjoyed his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, but in 10:04, he's just settling into his stride.

This entire work is something of a great mockery of the novel form, and its conventions. Constantly blurring and contrasting the lines between prose and verse, fiction and non-fiction, and seemingly every component of a story, all the way down to the minutiae of plot and character are subverted and toyed with.

It's difficult to really break down and comment on this book like you ordinarily would in a review, because it's just so weird. But despite breaking just about every rule you can break in literary writing, it's easy, and more than that, show more incredibly enjoyable to read.

Everything's the same, just a little different.

Read this fucking thing. show less

In 10:04, poet and novelist Ben Lerner has written a novel based on a previously published short story in which an unnamed narrator, also a poet-novelist, attempts to write a novel based on a recently published short story, while the narrator in that story seeks to write a novel from a short story. (Seriously, fiction does not get much more meta than that!) The book—the real one, that is—opens with a Brooklyn-based writer celebrating the success of a story he has published in a prestigious magazine that garners him a hefty advance for a future novel. However, he is uncertain about how to proceed, especially as he faces a health scare—an aortic heart condition—that brings his own mortality into play. His world is further show more complicated when his best friend asks him to be a sperm donor so that she can conceive a child, a request that leads him to question notions of family, friendship, and legacy. All this unfolds against the backdrop of political unease and climate change—the story is bookended by events surrounding two superstorms that imperil New York City—with references to other historical occurrences that further blur the line between fiction and reality in ways that add complexity to the narrative.

I had a mixed set of emotions when reading 10:04. On one hand, I found the author’s writing to be technically impressive and intellectually stimulating in the way it combined elements of poetry, prose, and meditative essays. (The book is even illustrated in places with various pictures and drawings, which brought to mind a comparison with W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.) Lerner was able to weave seemingly unrelated topics—literature, art, politics, the environment, raising a family, tragic historical events—into a reasonably cohesive tapestry that addresses many of the existential anxieties of the modern age. However, the details of the plot can be dense and the complicated structure of the story was hard to follow at times; this is certainly not linear story-telling, which made it seem more like a literary science project than a sincere effort to leave the reader with a relatable and engaging tale. Overall, this was a novel that I am glad I read, but not one that I can recommend without some hesitation. And, by the way, the novel’s quixotic title does have a logical explanation: considerable portions of the book reference the classic film Back to the Future and that is the exact time when the lightning bolt hits the clock tower and powers Marty McFly back home, thirty years forward! show less

Just put down Ben Lerner's 10:04 which is the semi-autobiographical story of a young author who is on sabbatical from college teaching and may or may not have Marfan's Syndrome (which Lincoln had). He is trying to impregnate his best friend, Alex,not his "girlfriend," but a platonic friend whom he met in college. She is 36, unemployed and wants to have a child and he is elected as good father material. The plot rambles through Brooklyn on their walks and Manhattan to the fertility clinic. He acts as big brother to an 8-year-old Latino boy named Roberto. He sells a book contract for a strong six figures ( “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, show more for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”) and flies to a residency in Marfa, Texas where he hibernates, walks, writes a poem rather than his novel. The themes of walking and of art and poetry run through the book, along with his fear of a dissecting aorta, another symptom of Marfan's. He watches the movie "Back to the Future" during two threatening hurricanes (Irene & Sandy) which is where the title originates. The language challenges: he does not cry but has a "lacrimal event." He suffers proprioception, a sort of unconscious awareness of the body's internal stimulii to external events. And I experienced the usual challenges of reading in bed, unwilling to get up and look up the words because I am smitten with the story, the writing, the references to [a:Walt Whitman (1819-1892)|7537643|Walt Whitman (1819-1892)|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-ccc56e79bcc2db9e6cdcd450a4940d46.png] and [a:Robert Creeley|39155|Robert Creeley|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1304430574p2/39155.jpg], the obscure National Book Award winner [a:William Bronk|275985|William Bronk|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-ccc56e79bcc2db9e6cdcd450a4940d46.png], the teaching/writing couple whose "house [was] so full of books that it seemed built of books," movies like The Stranger with Orson Welles, the exhibit of the Institute for Totaled Art (rescued from an insurance company warehouse). It is a book which is worthy of its challenges and I will be first in line for his next one. I loved it. Slate reviews it expertly here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/09/ben_lerner_s_novel_10_04_review...
Or bookforum here http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_03/13640 show less

This is an unusual book. The plot is non-linear and episodic. The protagonist, Ben, is a professor on sabbatical. He has received an advance to expand an article he wrote for the New Yorker into a full-length novel (similar to what Lerner is doing in 10:04). He considers himself more poet than novelist. He has an issue with his heart, which may (or may not) be related to Marfan’s Syndrome and is undergoing testing. He has been asked by his platonic best friend, Alex, to be the father of her child via intrauterine insemination. He serves as Big Brother to eight-year-old Roberto. He attends a writers’ retreat in Marfa, Texas, where he intends to work on his novel, but gets distracted by writing poetry and partying.

It is hard for me show more to articulate exactly why I enjoyed this book so much. It is creative, though occasionally digressive. The writing is erudite and clever. There are many literary and film references. It contains two hurricanes, and environmental themes pop up throughout the story. Our concept of time is a key theme, and the title is taken from Back to the Future. Other recurring elements include making art, walking, procrastinating, and ruminating. It is definitely not going to be for everyone since it does not have a discernable plot. It is a contemplation of our collective anxiety, and the constant worrying that accompanies life in today’s world (and this was written before the pandemic). It seems to me to be a reminder to enjoy life in the present rather than fretting about the future or reliving the past.

“I decided to replace the book I proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a flickering between them. I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present, alive with multiple futures.”

4.5 show less

You can’t help but be a little bit in awe of Ben Lerner’s deftness, his complex weave of images — imminent flooding that will reshape the Manhattan shoreline, the transition to fatherhood (possibly), time’s incessant beat and its echo in the past, the book he contracted to write and the book he has written — that turn in upon themselves, multiply and become something new. Frankly, you can’t help but be a little bit in awe of his vocabulary, a diction so rich and varied and sometimes abstruse that you might wonder whether he also talks this way (he does!). Some of the writing here is so measured and perfect that it constitutes a prose poem. And you will be brought to pause and think and revel, just a little bit.

The show more author/narrator of 10:04 is a sometimes author, not unlike Ben Lerner, who perhaps, despite his critical success as a novelist, continues to see himself as a poet, and more important to have a poet’s sensibilities or insensibilities. We follow the narrator across the course of a year from one inundating storm that wreaks havoc on the New Jersey and New York seaboard to another; bookends, if you will, that remind us of the mutability of even our seemingly most permanent cityscapes. The narrator is anxious, medically. But also existentially. He doubts himself and his comprehension, often rightly, without the surety of any fixed fulcrum from which to view change. That is a difficulty for the narrator as well as for the conceit of the novel since the oft repeated (in the novel) Hassidic story of the world to come says that, “Everything will be just as it is now, just a little different.” But what does that difference amount to if it cannot be confidently marked? Difference, on such a view, cannot be anything but perspectival, and that, inevitably, leads to the world to come being the world as it is, or was, or might yet be. To say that we have entered a liminal space would be an understatement.

Nevertheless, Lerner is able to generate an emotional bond with his reader at times that leaps across the barriers of arcane diction, post-modern anxiety about the novelistic form, and longed-for debts to prior poets. You may even experience, as the narrator does, more than one “lacrimal event,” which for the rest of us would be a tear or two.

Always worth reading, reflecting upon, then reading again. Recommended. show less

10:04, Ben Lerner’s follow up to the brilliant Leaving the Atocha Station ramps up the irony and the navel gazing. The narrator--a New York-based writer whose identity is so intricately intertwined with the author’s as to be one and the same--has recently experienced three momentous life events: he has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, a close friend has asked him to help her conceive a child, and a story he has written has been accepted by the New Yorker and a publisher is giving him a big advance to expand the story into a novel. The narrator is intelligent, observant and deeply ruminative, given to lengthy consideration of the scene before his eyes, internalizing and making conceptual leaps that often show more trigger even more involved reflection and questioning. The action is episodic and offers up a few brilliant set pieces, such as the scene in the fertility clinic and, much later, a hallucinogenic sequence that takes place at a writing retreat in Marfa, Texas, that ends with the narrator joining one of the other writers on a late-night quest for UFOs. The New York setting is electric with detail and buzzing with activity and characters: the narrator’s many friends and others who pass quickly through the action. Chronologically, 10:04 is set at a time when New York City was besieged by a series of storms, culminating in Hurricane Sandy, which struck in October 2012. But this is a book that is just as concerned with the past and the future as it is with the present day. The narrator has a number of fixations that emerge intermittently into the story: Walt Whitman, the movie Back to the Future and the Challenger disaster among them. The narrator is so consumed by looking back and looking forward that one begins to visualize the novel as a mark on a continuum, lying at a point somewhere between Whitman and an indefinite future moment that Lerner is beckoning or trying to evoke. In the end, an argument can be made that this is a novel about identity in a modern world that presents so many distractions and diversions that the integrity of the individual is threatened. Lerner seems to be asking how we can pursue our own agendas (in the novel, these are most often artistic in nature) when the community is relentless with its demands, the past filled with regret and the future uncertain. His investigation of these issues is often fascinating, but Lerner asks a lot of the reader. 10:04 does not offer the rewards of a conventionally plotted novel and might even be a pretentious and grievous miscalculation on the part of the author. But the only way to find out what it is, is to read it. show less

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 show more 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. show less