10:04

by Ben Lerner

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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, New York, American, Book Club

241 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2014

About the author

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.

Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Reviews

[William Wherry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fluctuates between being brilliant and being the trivial ramblings of a pompous douchebag.

[R.A. Raab · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m going to let the text of 10:04 by Ben Lerner do all the talking for me. This excerpt comes from page 47 of the book. See you at the bottom!

“So this is how it works, I said to myself, as if I’d caught an ideological mechanism in flagrante delicto: you let a young man committed to anticapitalist struggle shower in the overpriced apartment that you rent and, while making a meal you prepare to eat in common, your thoughts lead you inexorably to the desire to reproduce your own genetic material within some version of a bourgeois household, that almost caricatural transvaluation of values lubricated by wine and song. Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic–your bathroom–into the commons leads you to redescribe the possibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. All of this in the time it took to prepare an Andean chenopod. What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and co-construct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.”

Um … what??? If this sounds like great writing to you, then I strongly encourage you to read this book. To me, it sounds like a writing undergrad trying to impress his professor as he sits at his laptop surrounded by dictionaries and thesauri. Unreadable, pretentious dreck. Zero Stars.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book to come back to. It is certainly not for everyone, and I'll recommend it more gingerly than many books that I've liked less. I'll try to go into why here.

10:04 (a great reference) has something of Wallace in how it takes pleasure in its own form, something of Sebald in its meandering, something of Vonnegut (oddly enough) in its looping, something of Roth in its pseudo-memoirishness. It is more than anything else a great New York novel, and I felt envy while reading it. It does surpass LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION, which is an excellent book in its own right. He copies the best trick of STATION to great effect here: the most exciting, memorable, classically dramatic parts of the book are stories that the narrator is told or tells (there is one with his father that I particularly loved). This provides steady splashes of tension - the one thing the main action of the book lacks in. There are anxiety-provoking things going on, but you never really worry. You marvel at the form, the intelligence of the plot.

There are problems that are problems for me: Too many octopuses (octopi?); too much interpolation of poetry (I believe that Lerner is a good poet, but I know that he is a great prose writer. And the book drags when the poetry comes in); two art history sections when one would suffice (the one on destroyed art is fabulous, the one on Judd is meh (why do so many writers struggle when they turn to art? Knausgaard does too)); a sluggish start. The book really picks up in the beginning of Chapter Two, when the structure became apparent and some of the "excesses" of Chapter One turned brilliant.

There are problems that aren't problems for me. The classics, really: Nothing happens; a privileged white dude complains a lot; meta-fiction for the sake of meta-fiction. I anticipate backlash. I've already heard backlash. But there's too much gorgeous writing and unique thought here to tune out.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROPRIOCEZIONE


Jules Bastien-Lepage: Jeanne d’Arc (1879) Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York.

Sono io oppure sei tu. Sono io ma non sono io. Ti vedo ma non ti vedo. Sarà lui per davvero oppure…
Flirtando tra realtà e finzione, tra autobiografia e invenzione letteraria, tra autofiction e romanzo, Ben Lerner – scrittore americano che ho amato sin dalla sua prima uscita narrativa, Un uomo di passaggio del 2011 – anche quello come questo con uno strano percorso di traduzione del titolo: in quel caso da Leaving the Atocha Station, bella stazione ferroviaria di Madrid diventata celebre a causa di un micidiale attentato terroristico (nel 2004, 193 morti e duemila feriti), a, per l’appunto, Un uomo di passaggio; in questo caso da un semplice 10:04 a Nel mondo a venire - Ben Lerner che ho amato dal primo incontro, ma poi non so come mai ho aspettato così tanto per riprenderlo in mano, e farlo con il suo secondo romanzo, proprio questo, del 2014, anche questo un oggetto letterario non ben identificato…


Paul Klee: Angelus Novus (1920) Museo d'Israele, a Gerusalemme.

Ho smarrito il filo del discorso per eccesso d’entusiasmo.
Prova a riannodare: Alex è la sua migliore amica. Di pomeriggio vanno spesso al Metropolitan: lei è disoccupata e lui scrittore (quasi un sillogismo), hanno tempo libero. Lei dice: ho trentasei anni, sono single, voglio un figlio, noi siamo ‘migliori amici’, mi regali il tuo seme? Bada, niente sesso, solo il seme. Poi vediamo come gestire la tua partecipazione genitoriale.
E lui (si chiama Ben per caso?) invece di farci sapere che risponde, che pensa, si distrae e comincia a descrivere un quadro. Quadro e pittore mai sentiti (da me), descrizione che è una meraviglia, e illuminazioni a go go.
Solo che un attimo prima di tutto ciò, lui era in ospedale a fare analisi: pare che abbia una malformazione congenita dell’aorta, e comincia a immaginarsi esplosioni implosioni emorragie schizzi di sangue morte precoce. Che sia leggermente ipocondriaco questo io-narrante?


Regione di Cydonia su Marte, foto scattata dalla stazione orbitante Viking I.

Quando stava a Madrid (Leaving the Atocha Station - Un uomo di passaggio) il suo alter ego si chiamava Andrew Gordon ed era un poeta. Adesso, qui, si chiama Ben proprio come Lerner, anche se sembra un nome pronunciato per sbaglio, usato quasi di sfuggita solo un paio di volte, ed è un poeta con un romanzo alle spalle di ottima critica ma modeste vendite (diecimila copie). Sono entrambi, sia Andrew Gordon che Ben, flaneur, passeggiatori nella e della vita, sinuosi, svagati e curiosi, proprio come il per me mitico viandante di Sebald.


Vija Celmins: Concentric Bearings B (1984) Tate Gallery di Londra.

Ed è così che va avanti per quasi trecento pagine: un po’ di qua e un po’ di là, un po’ dentro e un po’ fuori, un po’ avanti (futuro) e un po’ indietro (passato), un po’ l’attimo presente e un po’ previsione di morte. Ogni tanto l’io si fa lui, la prima persona diventa terza, poi torna prima. Ogni tanto ho pensato a Sebald, ma un Sebald americano, con meno carico di memoria, un Sebald più sbarazzino, più giocoso.
Manca una storia unica, un collante – ma sarà poi vero? Solo perché non lo si può riassumere nei fatidici trenta secondi messi a disposizione dai famigerati produttori hollywoodiani? – ci sono tante storie, tanti collanti, si divaga, si torna indietro, si riprende il discorso per poi perderlo di nuovo: ma è tutto palesemente perfettamente incastrato, costruito, come le architetture di Donald Judd che sapevano rinnovare conservando il pregresso.
Un libro piacevolmente senza trama in senso classico, ma nel quale l’intreccio si costruisce attraverso un cumulo di elementi che sulle prime appaiono irrilevanti o sconnessi, è però la coscienza centrale dell’io narrante a tentare di ordinare e organizzare in una sequenza interiore, trasformandone o manipolandone il senso al solo scopo di renderli pienamente funzionali ai suoi esercizi di propriocezione.
Tutto interessante, tutto bello, tutto scritto alla grande. Uno sballo (per me).


Le scatole di Donald Judd in esposizione permanente alla Chinati Foundation a Marfa, Texas.

PS
Ah per la cronaca, la propriocezione è un termine mutuato dalla neurologia che indica la capacità di percepire e riconoscere la posizione del proprio corpo nello spazio e lo stato di contrazione dei propri muscoli, anche senza il supporto della vista. È quella che con la cervicale va a farsi benedire. È una di quelle che ti accorgi che esiste quando la perdi, non quando ce l’hai.

E se alla fine del libro tutto fosse uguale, solo un po’ diverso?


Il centro di Marfa, piccolo città del Texas a circa 1500 metri d’altitudine. È sede della fondazione Chinati che offre al narratore un soggiorno gratuito e ricompensato di cinque settimane durante le quali Diciamo che fu lì che decisi di sostituire il libro che avevo proposto all’editore con il libro che state leggendo ora, un’opera che, come una poesia, non è una storia vera né di fantasia, ma un guizzare fra le due cose; mi proposi di dilatare non in un romanzo sulla frode letteraria, sulla falsificazione del passato, ma in un vero e proprio presente vivo di molteplici futuri.. Sulla base di quel racconto pubblicato dal New Yorker, Ben ha ricevuto un anticipo di 300mila dollari per ampliarlo in un romanzo.

[Vivi · Rating 1 out of 5]

How much pretentiousness can you fit in a short book. I had a "mild lacrimal event" of joy when it was over

[Glenn Russell]

Here's Gilbert Sorrentino on David Antin's talk poems: “They are long, sinuous pieces, turning and twisting about a central theme or themes, and approaching that center by means of all the intellectual devices that the poet can lay his hands on. The voice that speaks these poems is incisive, articulate, witty and learned.”

From my reading of 10:04, Gilbert Sorrentino could have been describing the five chapters of this odd, strangely compelling novel by American poet Ben Lerner.

10:04 is my first exposure to Ben Lerner. His Leaving the Atocha Station is now on my TBR list. I wish I could engage in a little compare/contrast between the two Lerner novels but I can't. However, I did read where James Wood characterized narrator Adam Gordon of Atocha Station as "a convincing representative of twenty-first century American homo literatus, a creature of privilege and lassitude...certain of his own uncertainty thus more easily defined by negation than affirmation."

Ben, the first-person narrator of 10:04, surely shares much in common with Adam Gordon, thus I'll give this 33-year old New York City resident the name of Ben Gordon (hey, befitting; after all, we're talking 21st century autofiction/metafiction here).

Ben Gordon is a successful novelist and poet recently diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition. In the novel's opening pages, Ben Gordon tells us his longtime friend Alex has proposed that she get impregnated with his sperm via intrauterine insemination rather than good old intercourse since, as she tells him directly, "fucking you would be bizarre."

Ben Lerner frames 10:04 thusly, but don't look for the traditional 19th Century type of story wherein characters move and develop through an Aristotelian arc of plot; nope, not even close. 10:04 has the feel of postmodern leveling, where events, happenings and reflections could be radically rearranged without making that much difference. And for a very good reason: what really matters in 10:04 is narrative voice.

Oh, yes, fanfare with tubas and trumpets: narrative voice - a distinctive, poetic, engrossing narrative voice we gladly follow as Ben Lerner has Ben Gordon shuck and jive and occasionally flounder in his odyssey through the contemporary urban landscape. I would think many readers with birthdays hovering around 1979 (Ben Lerner's year of birth) have closely identified and bonded with Ben Gordon. And, by extension, with Ben Lerner.

Films play a huge part in 10:04. And as every film has a trailer, so the following batch of highlights can serve as this novel's trailer:

Everything will be as it is now, just a little different - This statement comes from the Hassidim and is the concluding sentence of the novel's epigraph. The narrator continually reflects on the nature of identity and how one's personal sense of self relates to the overarching reality of time and repetition. It's not for nothing Ben Gordon muses on the “critical movie of my youth” - Back to the Future. One of the photos included in the novel is a still of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) pondering his half-present hand.

Successful Author – Ben Gordon has recently published a story in The New Yorker and there's talk of a six-figure advance if he'd be willing to turn it into a novel. So intriguing; Ben Gordon will occasionally shift into third-person and allude to himself as “the writer” or “the poet.” Many the time while reading I had the distinct sense the narrator lives a double life: his immediate, physical presence and his persona as an accomplished author, reminding me of that famous tale of a world class writer facing a similar dilemma in Borges and I.

Art Alive and Well in the Present Tense – Ben Lerner's background as an art critic manifests in each of the novel's five chapters. “Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they'd been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from the ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter's gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.”

I include the above extended quote to emphasize much of 10:04 can be taken as a meditation on Walter Benjamin's famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, with its themes of reappropriation, recontextualization and the loss of “aura” of originality.

Stunning and Scintillating - One of the most intriguing sections of 10:04 comes about when Ben Gordon travels to Marfa, Texas to view Donald Judd's art. He's been thinking about the phenomenon of how, as appreciators of literature and the arts, we coconstruct a work and his time in West Texas gives him a chance to flex his creative muscles.

Here's but a snip: "All those windows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, the differently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain a blurry image of the landscape within them - all combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work had never had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York."

Potpourri - The narrator shares a variety of other experiences/happenings, including feeling a kinship with Walt Whitman, his brushing with a young beauty reminding him of a Modigliani, collaborating with a lad on a dinosaur project, elaborating of his ongoing medical issues. However, since the major strength of the novel is Ben Lerner's poetic voice, I'll let the author have the last words via these direct 10:04 quotes:

“I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is."

"That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.”

“Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.”


American author Ben Lerner, born 1979

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator is a millennial, a successful writer, a valetudinarian. There’s no plot. The novel’s character and verbiage driven. He likes multisyllabic words but don’t we all? He drives around Brooklyn and Manhattan. He takes the subway. He walks to a bar in DUMBO to see vaguely realized friends. He lends an Occupy Wall Street activist the use of his shower and cooks a meal for him. He fucks a woman who immediately rejects him. He has heart problems. He sees the need for reform of capitalism, and praises the Park Slope Food Coop. There are a few unfortunate sentences:

“Is that why you’ve exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership?” (p. 93)

Another show-stopper: “Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community.” (p. 108)

These are what I think of as dream killers if, indeed, as John Gardner said, the narrative is the dream. But ultimately in a text so brilliant they’re momentary untowardnesses. Like a growling stomach at a wedding. What I especially like is Lerner’s ability to take relatively recent news events—like the New York Times’s story that Park Avenue Co-op members were sending their nannies to do their monthly labor (2011)—and fearlessly incorporate them into the story. And I thought Ali Smith was rushing things.

“It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I‘d grown familiar, a new bio-political vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were – for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault – compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism – ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc. – in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe the caring for your own genetic material – feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice – as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, chemically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.” (p. 98)

There’s much more here I’m not touching on. Climate Change—Hurricane Sandy; to become or not to become a father; a writer’s residency in Marfa, etc. It’s highly autobiographical. There’s too much post modernist hoodoo but the satire is brilliant. I think it an excellent novel of New York literary life. Others that spring to mind include Sigrid Nunez’s recent The Friend and Edmund White’s harrowing The Farewell Symphony.

[Rachel B. Glaser · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly love this book. 10:04 works like a drug, heightening thought and drawing awareness to thought. Lerner maps out the history, science, emotions, objects, habits, and vibes that make up the complexity of each felt moment. Beautiful meditation on language. A real blast to read! Does things I've never seen done! Things that recall Barth and Barthelme and Coover. It is personal while largely fabricated. It dances between life and fiction. The cover feels amazing to the touch. Epically "of the (current) times" in a way I've never experienced before! The book continues narrating, even after the reader has put it down. 10:04 gives the reader the power to have in depth thoughts about their thoughts, thus creating a sort of stoned, intuitive, obsessive, sometimes selfish, sometimes transcendental logic bubble within the reader (while reading and after reading), a lingering luxury thought lounge.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book - the first time -over a year ago -after a 'Lisi-girls' - day in Walunt Creek --lunch and bookstore playing. This was an indi-treat purchase. I came home and started reading it immediately, but then set it down. I picked it up again and started from the beginning. .....set it down again --- - picked it up again - ( several cycles of reading: stop-start-stop). Eventually gears kicked in - and "10:04" had my undivided attention.

The writing itself is thought-provoking-- invigorating at times-definitely abstract-- and a *vocabulary booster*. It's a challenging read - but the sarcasm was refreshingly entertaining. It's an odd book ---and the story is not easy to follow....( or at least it wasn't for me)... but once I got rolling, enjoyment took off.

A storm is about to hit New York, but then the story switches quickly, and centers around narrator who has a fatal medical condition and his best friend, Alex wants to have a baby with him as a donor.

There are also subplots--or a story within a story --a writers retreat in Arizona in the middle of the story - but when I back up - we see that the author is looking at the world and the people in it through time - past, present & future.... challenging pure perception. There are some insights about living around the clock in today's world.... so many things are potentially disturbing.

Here's an excerpt that I read a few times that set a mood for much more to come:
"I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; what ever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved in the storm; even that relativity avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that:
it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability wish strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because these moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they should not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they faded from the photograph".

Some parts of this crazy- goofy- book are also 'hilarious'. Abnormal sperm anyone?
Don't even ask!!!

Easy to understand? No - not fully! Enjoyable for what it is - and impressive? YES!!!

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story is very aware of itself. It's the kind of story that looks in the mirror all day, rearranging its artfully disheveled bangs. I've called it a "story" twice but it's really more of an exercise. Kind of like spending an hour on a stationary bike. Afterwards, you feel like you've accomplished something but you're still in the same exact place.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

10:04 is a novel about how Ben Lerner signs a contract to write a particular novel, and then does a bunch of other things rather than write it. He goes to an artists' colony in Texas, where he works on poetry instead of on the novel. He decides whether to serve as a sperm donor for his best friend Alex, who cautions him not to put her in his novel. He weathers two (literal) hurricanes. He serves as a "big brother" of sorts for an elementary school student (they self-publish a brief book on dinosaurs, included here). He frets about writing the novel but doesn't really get serious about writing it. This novel is the result. It's a novel about not writing a novel.

At this point, this idea is nothing new; the film Adaptation and Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage spring to mind, and of course there are many other meta-novels out there. By the same token, Ben Lerner inserting himself into works that are ostensibly fiction is also nothing new. Of course, reading 10:04 we're aware that some of the stuff that seems to be autobiographical is really just made up—but do we really care enough to want to sort it all out?

More so even than Lerner's previous novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 has a forced quality. There are various themes he keeps circling back to, but it never feels organic, and for me there was never a moment when it all clicked into place. I noticed what he was doing every time: "Oh," I would think, "he's bringing that idea in again." It was benign but extremely self-conscious.

Yet, I enjoyed the experience of reading this much more than Atocha. This time around, I was OK wandering around in Lerner's head as Lerner wandered around town—maybe because he experienced no language barrier in this book and, because he was therefore freer with this speech and actions, he was also freer with his thoughts? 10:04 just had an easier prose style to me, and was more emotionally accessible. With Atocha I could never tell when Lerner was trying to be funny or not; I felt constantly off-balance. With 10:04 I could tell when I was supposed to laugh and when I was supposed to feel moved. This doesn't sound like high praise, but it enabled me to relax into the story (or "story") in a way I couldn't with Atocha.

And as it turns out, Lerner is perfectly (or newly) capable of crafting scenes with genuine emotional impact. When I laughed, it was because I genuinely found things funny. When I was moved, it was because I had read something that genuinely moved me. Lerner has also gotten much better at setting: There was a vividness and tactile quality to his descriptions of places here that I just don't remember from Atocha, despite the latter's more foreign (to me), and thus potentially more fascinating, locale.

Ben Lerner would probably not want to hear this, but I would really like to see him put these newly revealed skills to use in a more conventional novel, one that still has intellectual and literary themes but that manages to work them into an actual plot. Granted, this type of novel is not particularly fashionable at the moment. Still, as it always does, a new moment is bound to come around again. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 1 out of 5]

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means". Inigo Montoya (Princess Bride)

10:04 would make a great end-of-term paper for a certain type of creative writing course.

It would score full marks for showing the writer's ability to use a thesaurus. The golden rules of this novel are to never say pigeon when you can wittily refer to "stout-bodied passerines" (your wit is shown all the more by doing this several times in the book), never say "it was foggy but not snowing" when you can say "except now the material form of excitation wasn't ice, the air was heavy with water in its gas phase.". A character, must drink a "high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phopshoric acid and E150d", never coke, not cry but have "lacrimal events". Neither may he sweat, rather he must have "urea and salt emerging from his underarms" (again used more than once); particularly when they meet an attractive woman, except that has to be one who's figure is "consistent with normative male fantasy", and she must be coeval not merely of a similar age to him (used it feels almost every page - Lerner's particularly fond of that word). And that may in turn lead to the character "deploying my hands Onanistically". Hopefully the last needs no translation, although Lerner's intended meaning isn't even biblically accurate of course, and he/the narrator also admits that pigeons aren't actually passerines; hence the words of Inigo Montaya to Vizzini, another person convinced of his own wit.

Lerner could possibly be an amusing and stimulating dinner party guest, although he probably wouldn't get a second invite, but by no stretch of the imagination is this great literature.

The fact that the book comes with blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, writers of two of the very worst novels I've read in the last 15 years, and that the author seems overly fond of things like the Occupy movement should have warned me that this would be self-indulgence of the worst kind.

Even the story is self-indulgent - the narrator is (like Lerner), author of a critically acclaimed first novel, and, on the strength of a New Yorker story (included verbatim) receives a big advance for his second novel. And the narrator decides to write his novel about writing his novel, which is of course the novel we're reading. How much of the narrator's story is really Lerner's I'm not sure, and indeed don't care, but it adds to the self-satisfied feel. The story is then padded out with descriptions of the experience of taking recreational drugs, one of the most tedious forms of literature, and descriptions of others works of art, which sound a lot more interesting that the novel we're reading.

There is one glimmer of hope. The narrator's agent tells him that "there are risks to taking a big advance - because if the book doesn't sell at all, nobody's going to want to work with you again.". If true, let's hope 10:04 doesn't sell (I borrowed mine from the library which hopefully doesn't count to earning his advance).

[Dottie B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well for one thing, I can't stand this title. 10:04? Who'd pick that? My favorite time is 4:30. That's when all my shows start coming on. Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown, The People's Court, and Cops. Then the news! I love the news. But I did NOT love this book. Sorry, Ben. There's a bunch of pictures in here. This isn't a photography book. What are you, Ben? A photographer? NO YOU'RE NOT! A POET. AND POETS ARE SUPPOSED TO RISE ABOVE. Ben did not rise above. This character just seemed petty to me. Like nobody wants to hear about this. People want to hear about girls having bad sex with writers they know, child rape, spouses dying, post-apocalyptic language games, books written by teenage heartthrob TV stars-- that kind of stuff! I mean from what I hear Ben has worked a long time, and now here he goes just throwing it all away. I'm SURE this book will ruin his career! All he worked for! They were going to make statues of you, Ben. What the heck happened. You're not even in this book. Which is funny, since the main character has your name. What are you on? Are you on psychiatric medicine? Will you tell me what kind? I'll listen. Dottie always listens. This book makes me feel like when you're trying to comfort a friend because they're crying, who you've been friends with for so many years, and then they try to French Kiss you. I hate those Frogs. Or when you're sitting with a friend at a bar and they start asking for drugs. Just say no! Anyway, I feel better now. Thank you for listening. Go Buckeyes!

[Marcello S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno dei punti di riferimento di questi anni.
Rilettura densamente significativa.

[87/100]

/////
31-12-2015

Che gran libro! Ho usato tutto il tempo libero degli ultimi due giorni per leggerlo. Difficile da raccontare perché non ha una trama ben definita e perché c’è molta vita (presumibilmente) vera mischiata a fiction, o almeno questa è l’impressione generale. Lerner è un gran paraculo, uno che aveva un po’ di idee niente male in testa e un racconto già pronto (e pubblicato sul New Yorker) e ha trovato il modo vincente di mettere tutto insieme. Tipo: la storia di Noor è micidiale. Quella del funerale del padre di Rachel anche meglio. Il racconto del patrigno di Alex se li mangia entrambi. Poi c’è la navicella spaziale Challenger lì nel cielo il 28 gennaio 1986, le foto in bianco e nero di Cartier-Bresson, i giovedì sera in cooperativa, l’attesa dell’uragano in una New York dai tratti post-apocalittici. Periodi di isolamento nel deserto che pare di leggere Kerouac. I dinosauri e Ritorno al futuro. Ci sono un sacco di cose, che in alcuni casi sembrano episodi slegati più simili a racconti che a capitoli di un romanzo, ma alla fine tutto ha un senso. Copertina davvero brutta, all’altezza del catalogo Sellerio.
Grazie a Cosimo per avermelo consigliato qualche tempo fa.

[80/100]

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Lerner came to my attention when his The Topeka School was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize back in the year of the plague. Two years later, and after some research, I finally picked one of his novels up and, surprisingly, considering how weird it was, I think it’s safe to say that I’m definitely going to check his other two novels out.

Here’s a list of the main weird things that turned this into a weird read:

First weird thing: the title.
Of course I did wonder what the hell could 10:04 mean, but, thank goodness, it didn’t take long for me to realise why the author chose it as a title. The main character is a nerd and loves pop culture. Yes, that’s as much as I’m going to tell you about the title.

Second weird thing: the highly pretentious writing, especially at the beginning.
Bloody hell, for the first fifty pages or so I really thought I had picked the wrong book up and was actually reading something penned by Mr. Don DeLillo. Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to realise that Ben Lerner is a very intelligent and funny guy and that he was just messing around with his readers.

Third weird thing: the novel’s structure.
Okay, so on the topic of structure, I’ll have to say that I can see it working as well for you as it did for me, as much as I can see it not working at all for you. Going from dreams to flashbacks and even different stories within the main story, this probably isn’t going to work for people who enjoy more linear/straightforward narratives.

Why did I enjoy it so much then, you may ask?

Well, first of all, because it was hilarious, and I do love it when a book makes me laugh out loud.
To be completely honest, I’ll have to say that it was also because it was extremely unsettling and disturbing at times, and for some weird reason, I do like to feel unsettled and disturbed (by novels and films).

It was also, and that was the most surprising thing for me, incredibly moving.
How did Ben Lerner manage to move me with a story that included dinosaurs, dentists (ugh!), anecdotes, drugs and conspiracy theories? I guess this is one of those questions I will never get an answer for.

I’m finding it very hard to categorise this novel, but I’d probably go for post-modernism.
I don’t know… I really can’t shake the feeling that I’ve just been played with by the author.

It was kind of a mess, yes, but a lovely and clever mess, nonetheless.

And besides, I can’t give less than four stars to a story where a pigeon ends up swallowing half of a Viagra, right?

[Cosimo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sul punto di esistere

“E così l'autore si ritrovò, col corpo ancora un po' appesantito dai residui di un anestetico dissociativo per uso veterinario, a viaggiare per quindici chilometri sulla statale 67, per dare un'occhiata alle famose “luci fantasma” insieme a un uomo sul quale aveva sovraimposto l'immagine di uno spettro.”

Hai la sensazione di muoverti seguendo una mappa mentale, fatta di astrazioni e percezioni emotive, pensieri e stati d'animo, nella quale le strade si rigenerano, gli incroci si diramano e le vie di fuga e i sensi unici si moltiplicano, come in un quadro dell'espressionismo astratto. Non c'è solo un allontanarsi per le vie della meditazione di questo intellettuale del Kansas innestato a New York, alle prese con un romanzo di metafiction, che mescola low e highbrow con eccentricità e talento; si trova sott'acqua, a sorreggere la sua immaginazione, una malinconia eventuale, una fragilità perseguita di fronte all'uragano del possibile e del potenziale, alla natura refrattaria e trascendente della poesia e della scrittura. Lerner pratica con ossessione notturna e mania somatopsichica un'arte irrecuperabile, danneggiata, non usufruibile: oggetti riproducibili a cui è stata tolta l'originalità, che come i capitoli del romanzo sembrano differenti stesure, versioni e copie della stessa opera e viaggiano nel tempo. Perciò, l'autore ha il terrore della responsabilità, della paternità in senso ampio, se non per i vantaggi materiali che comporta; si sente inadeguato rispetto ad essa, anormale e infermo dentro l'autenticità richiesta. Scoperta la verità come sempre traumatica, percorre così il tema della falsificazione (il brontosauro è un falso scientifico) come escamotage, beffa virtuale, stratagemma da autoironica sofisticazione, illusione extraterrestre. Infine riesce ad aggirare il lutto, a scostarsi dal dolore fisico della perdita, creando un racconto, una proiezione del passato in un futuro ipotetico, oltre quelle voci, registrazioni di voci e luci fantasma che a noi appaiono come esseri necessari, destinatari del nostro amore e della nostra vivacità. Indubbiamente, il romanzo diviene la storia di come Lerner ha scritto il romanzo, con i suoi temi ineluttabili: inseminazione, creazione, estinzione, destino catastrofico, minaccia imminente della malattia, frangibilità del corpo, liquidità delle relazioni, essenza effimera della vita: cose che fanno accelerare il cuore, per poi svanire nel nulla della memoria. In attesa che il mondo si ricombini per l'ennesima volta.

“Un'opera che, come una poesia, non è una storia vera né di fantasia, ma un guizzare fra le due cose; mi proposi di dilatare il racconto non in un romanzo sulla frode letteraria, sulla falsificazione del passato, ma in vero e proprio presente vivo di molteplici futuri”.

[Enrique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Metaficción de la buena.  Es un género que llevaba tiempo sin leer tras el bum que hace años se puso tan de moda, mezcla el tiempo presente del autor (que te hace estar comprobando continuamente datos que aporta para contrastarlos con la realidad, fechas, etc), con la más pura ficción y recreación de relaciones sociales, enfermedades, etc totalmente imaginarias.

Como siempre en este género es un poco lío discernir lo real de lo ficcionado, y eso es precisamente lo que sin querer siempre está buscando el lector, si lo que cuenta el escritor es cierto o no, o si lo que cuenta el protagonista es autobiográfico. Lo que sí que creo puedo discernir es la buena calidad en la escritura. De la escuela de algunos de los escritores norteamericanos de hace unos años. No había leído a Lerner pero me recuerda sobre todo a John Irving, incluso a Franzen, estos escritores tienen tal personalidad que no les asusta el tema sobre el que escriben, no tienen miedo sobre lo que cuentan, por muy absurdos que sean esos temas. Aquí el tema de la novela es el propio libro que se está escribiendo.

Los giros, construcciones y formas narrativas son muy muy buenos, de escritor veterano a pesar de la relativa juventud de Lerner. No parece que se trate de un poeta con apenas tres novelas publicadas.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a longish review ("Warm Core: The Unusually Associative Cyclonic System of Ben Lerner’s 10:04") I wrote soon after the book came out in mid-September that's just appeared in the Dec–Jan issue of the Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/12/b...

The key insight: "The world rearranging itself around the narrator sounds a lot like solipsism, but instead of masturbating to Internet porn, the center of the rearranged world in this case does so in a fertility clinic to impregnate his best friend. The suggestion is clear: Ben’s literal and figurative wankery is generative, not indulgent."

Really enjoyed/admired this although re-reading the review it seems insufficiently superlative. Also, the long questions in the review reflect something Lerner does a few times in his novel.

[David Katzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

​Intellectual books can be wonderful. Books about intellectuals...not so much. I exaggerate for effect, but that happens to be the case here. Books about writers are not easy to pull off. Books about intellectual writers even harder because it's not as easy to invest emotionally in an intellectual as it is an actor, one who spends their timing doing, living, feeling, reacting versus one who spends paragraph after paragraph offering up critical and philosophical analyses of various occurrences and objects from a perspective that seems to have little separation from the author. You have to be really fascinated by the critical analyses of this character/author to feel invested in her/him. Otherwise, it becomes a series of brief essays that don't provide much to invest in other than a thought experiment that you may or may not find compelling.

As a writer, writing about writers can seem a bit...self indulgent, shall we say? Self-important? In general, I am not a huge proponent of "write what you know" because I favor imagination over slavishness to "reality." In the case of a writer writing about a writer, the bar is set even higher because number one...writing is boring. I should say, watching someone write is boring. No one wants to read a story about someone writing. So what matters is actually everything else about this writer outside of their writing. So why make them a writer? Seems to me like an easy default if you want to "write what you know." And I find it particularly irritating when the character is very much like the actual author rather than one obviously distinct from her/himself, such as in The Information, wherein the main character was also a critic and was, so it seemed to me, a straw man upon which Amis could take out his aggression against shallow, self-important writer-wannabes and lit critics. A target, if you will, rather than a mirror. Yes, it can be pulled off, when the author is a genius and her or his thoughts do fascinate. I think of The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, which is somewhere between essay and autobiography and fiction without ever being defined.

In 10:40, Lerner writes about an intellectual writer (New Yorker mag published) who has many attributes like his own. He's a poet and reluctant novelist who lives in New York City. The book does follow some of the experiences in his life, rather modest occurrences such as going to a writer's retreat and attending a party of artists and art aficionados. Attempting to impregnate his best friend who wants a child with his DNA. Meeting some of his past mentors, from university--one of whom is dying--getting a book deal, having an Occupy activist stay at his house, hearing a story told to him by a woman at a food coop, and so on. What actually happens is not much. Mostly it's either evaluation of what is happening or a conversation. Bits of it were just annoying, like the party of cringe worthy artist/hipsters. Like the writer and the Occupy guy finding humor in how guys "act is if their dicks are huge" when they are using a urinal. Ha ha? Like the use of the word "proprioception" three times. I found the relationship with his best friend kind of annoying too and never got much of a sense of her personality...which added to the self-indulgent aspect of the writing. The story within the story, at the organic food coop, was an "interesting story" if I was reading an essay. But that's the exact problem here, where it's related by a character we never meet again. The main character passively listens to the story addressed to him, considers it a little then moves on. And that is a perfect metaphor for my experience of this novel. I felt "talked at" without any lasting impact.

Lerner has also worked in some tidbits of postmodernism. Very modest, user-friendly experimentation. I had to read these bits more than once to realize what he was even doing because they were so casually woven in. For example, the use of "you" to address the reader. Comments like "she's not in this story." References to the story published in the New Yorker based on the "real life" of the fictional narrator, and how he altered various names and situations for privacy reasons...and then the following chapter is that New Yorker story, showing how he changed what had happened (which is ironic because, presumably, the actual novel itself is already an altered version of the author's real life). 10:40 was pomo-lite. Pop-pomo. If you want to be experimental, go hard. Lerner was doing little more than playing mildly with the rules of fiction.

Lerner has skill with words, no doubt. I did enjoy his linguistic and grammatical work at times. On that strength, he gets three stars.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

10:04 marks a time particularly important in film-and the relationship of that film to this book. This book is quasi-factual, quasi-memoir, quasi-fiction in which those lines are constantly shifting and blurring. The author has had unusual success with his first literary work and is now facing a possibly fatal medical condition in a New York City that may be underwater at any moment.

The writing is brilliant. I had one particular favorite sentence that I insisted upon reading to anyone (and everyone) who came near me. And it cracked me up every time. Although the humor, as is true of so much of this work, is an edgy one, possibly not meant as humorous at all. I felt like the author wrote the way I thought (if I were gifted with immense literary wit). Certainly his anxious, constantly commenting mind resonated with my own and his life teeters between amusing and terrifying, as befits all of us living in this dark, potentially cataclysmic century.

I borrowed this book from the library-I may have to buy it to read it again, more closely. The narrator's world is constantly sliding into nightmare territory and barely escaping whole. The book is witty, funny, and unnerving.

This is a book I highly recommend.

[CJ Alberts]

ummmmm ben lerner has that SAUCE im afraid!!!! wry self deprecating anxious king

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

kasırga beklentisiyle birlikte oluşan tükeniş-yıkım duygusunun kuşattığı bir şehir, şehirde bir şair-yazar kahraman, kahramanın geçmiş ile gelecek, gerçek ile kurgu, hayat ile sanat arasında savrulması: hikayeden çok günümüz dünyasını yansıtan kaygılı, şüpheli, belirsiz, tekinsiz atmosferi ve dağınık, kalabalık, parçalanmış yapısıyla öne çıkan bir roman.

bugünü, günümüzün dünyasını romanla anlatmanın zorluğu malum. lerner hikaye içinde yürüttüğü geçmiş ve gelecek düşüncelerini, farklı bir “şimdiki zaman” kavramını romanın biçimine de uygulayarak bu zorluğu aşmayı başarıyor. benzer olarak hikayenin diğer iki hattı (gerçek-kurmaca, hayat-sanat) biçimle paralel. şair-yazar kahraman yaşadıklarını kurgulayıp yazarken biz de lerner’in gerçek-kurmaca sınırındaki 22:04’ünü okuyoruz. muhtemelen.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific, like a scalding espresso on an icy morning. This is the book I need to be reading now. I read and loved its Iberian predecessor Leaving the Atocha Station earlier this year. From the opening scene, in which the author watches a man break down in front of a painting, and feels pangs of doubt about his own connection with his art, Lerner wrote with honesty and an indefatigable commitment to the search for artistic vision. It was a bildungsroman for this hyper-knowing, ironic and distracted generation.

Here, Lerner has broadened the scope, both geographically and thematically. The book covers the author's life after having published a critically praised small-press debut and receiving a big advance from a mainstream publisher (which he spends mostly on miscellaneous good deeds). It contains various metafictional tricks, two "superstorms", a residency in Marfa, Texas, and various drugs and literary soirees. The stories within stories don't quite cohere - indeed, this book would probably work much better if it were the same length as Atocha - but Lerner has remembered the cardinal rule of experimental fiction: be interesting, so that if the concept doesn't come off, the reader still enjoys herself.

A big publisher like FSG signing on an overtly experimental author inevitably means that the book will be read by people whose goals as readers are entirely at odds with the author's intentions. Thus, Goodreads has a lot of reviews complaining about the language, and deriding the novel's dialogue as pretentious. This misses the point by a mile. Lerner is first and foremost a poet, specifically, a poet who valorises the near-impenetrable thickets of John Ashberry. He has toned his language down for the sake of this novel, to make it more novel-like, but not much: there is little plot or characterisation. 10:04 is essentially a high concept examination of time and of modalities (alternative worlds - what philosophers would call "modal realism") in art and fiction, of the potential innate in our past and future selves, and the possibility of finding real collectivity - of transgressing the boundaries within our isolated, class-stratified communities.

I look back on the totaled city, and see it in the second-person plural. I know it is hard to understand. / I am with you, and I know how it is.

There is something Hegelian in Lerner's approach: abstracting the world to a high level, and then applying the results in alarmingly specific political ways. Late on in the book, a discussion with a grad student undergoing a serious nervous breakdown is reproduced in full, and the protagonist mulls on and agrees with most of the student's conspiracy theories. That the moon landings were faked, at least in theory, is an ongoing motif in another section. Lerner's book-self is open to many sinister views of the world, and one senses that the author himself is prepared to buy into all of them.

In a sense, then, 10:04 is about all of these conspiracy theories, as well as animal rights, environmentalist doomsday scenarios, and class warfare. It is about creativity and assisted reproduction and faked cancer. It is about hysterical authors and wasted advances and technological disconnections. Lerner is too canny, and too distracted, to be tied down to one thing, so he makes his novel about all of them, and how all may be true and false in their own way. Such wandering can be ephemeral and short on satisfying conclusions, but that is the nature of Mr. Lerner's restless, brilliant mind. It is a great pleasure to follow along with him.

[Biron Paşa · Rating 4 out of 5]

22:04 modern hayatın, modern insanın dünyasını tuhaf bir şekilde samimiyetle anlatan bir roman.

Kitapta üzerine konuşacağımız çok şey var. Sağlık, sanat, modern sanat, şiir, ırklar arası fırsat eşitsizliği, üreme, edebiyatın maddi karşılığı, komplo teorileri, gelecek gibi. Ama bunların hepsini buraya yazsam da 22:04'ün samimiyetle gösterdiği şeyleri karşılar mı, bence karşılamaz. Nedir peki bunların ötesindeki anlam? Bilemiyorum, belki modern insanın çok bilmiş dağılmışlığı, belki hayatın yapaylığı, emin değilim. Şunu söylemek mümkün, kitap kesinlikle dolu, zengin.

Ama kitapta esas ilgimi çeken şey samimiyet oldu. Çünkü samimiyet dendiğinde genelde aptal insanların bayağılığa karşı duyduğu hayranlığı görüyoruz ve yazacağı kitabı düşünürken etrafındaki insanlara bakıp kitabının kesinlikle satmayacağını söyleyen biri samimiyetten çok kibirle ilişkilendiriliyor. Oysa samimiyet popülizmle mümkün değildir. Bu kitapta da yazacağı kitabı sürekli kazanacağı bilmemkaç haneli parayla düşünen yazarı gördüğümüzde, içimizdeki onu ayıplayan sesi bastırıp sempati duyuyoruz.

Kitabı okurken öncesinde yazarın ilk romanını okumadığıma pişman oldum. Okuyacak olanlara tavsiyem, benim düştüğüm hataya düşmesinler.

Bir de kitaptaki "geleceğe" bakışla ilgili şöyle bir yazı var, önemli olduğunu düşünüyorum: http://t24.com.tr/k24/yazi/gelecegin-...

[Banu Yıldıran Genç · Rating 4 out of 5]

yarı kurmaca yarı gerçek, son derece doğal bir roman.
new york'la istanbul'un benzerliklerini, beyaz yakalıların ya da sanatçıların kaygılarının aynılığını görmek çok acayipti.
modern insanın takıntıları (sağlık, doğallık, üreme vs) o kadar gerçekçi bir biçimde anlatılmış ki yazarı içtenliği ve cesareti sebebiyle kutlamak gerekiyor. en saçma korkularını, kapitalizmle savaşımını ve biraz da boşunalığını anlatmış, bizi bize göstererek...

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synopsis

Our narrator is asked to expand a recently published short story into a novel. Lines are blurred throughout the book as the narrator/author fictionalise truth and assume alternate characters - the mise en abyme conceit. The reader is taken on a metaphysical roller coaster that makes 10:04 anything but an easy read.
The book divides into five sections. In truth a number of the strands could be repositioned elsewhere in the book without distorting the overall meaning unduly.
We start with (real) lifelong girl....friend, Alex, (” less a couple, than conjoined) and the emotional dilemma, of whether the narrator should become a sperm donor, vs the awkwardness of full coitus, as a friend. This is the most straightforward part of the narrative and it plays out through the book, and to the backdrop of freakishly stormy weather in New York City.
An old university lecturer mentor is taken ill; a young boy (Roberto- aged eight) is tutored by the narrator; an Occupy Walk Street protestor gets a shower and a meal. The narrator works as a volunteer in a food Co-op; the ill-fated Challenger space mission (with Christa McAuliffe, and Peggy Noonan’s tribute) is formative; we visit the Institute of Totalled Art (based on the real life Salvage Art Institute); drug fuelled parties; German prisoners of war (from Rommel’s Afrika corps). it’s an eclectic mix
Any link between these events isn’t obvious, or necessary. There is a set of largely unconnected events that individually make a very satisfying read.

The obvious, understandable, and legitimate, criticism of Ben Lerner’s prose style is that it is sometimes hideously overwritten. Words are used that are rarely, if ever, heard in aural communication.
That said, if these words exist in the dictionary it could be argued that Lerner is doing no more than enriching language, and using available resources.

Questions

Several! Joining the dots on a Lerner novel demands a degree of reader perseverance and imagination.
What is the prevalent theme, or meaning in this book of separate, anecdotal stories?
• when the author stands in front of a gaslight in New York (67). He imagines the view in 2012 (now), 1912, 1883. Why these two yesteryear dates?

Making Sense of the Themes

* “Everything is the same but a little different“ (prologue- Hasidim); (19) (54) (109) (156)

The narrators prospective book, including falsification of correspondence
• “ a novel about deception” (137) Faking the past to find the future (123)
•
• Back to the Future clock tower. The various references to this 1970’s (now rather dated) film, seemed a bit shoehorned into the story. The book title is the time at which the Clock Tower is frozen. There’s even a photograph of Michael J. Fox embedded in the text.
The narrator says that “ the objective of the book is to project myself into several futures simultaneously” Pictures of the Challenger mission ” a project pulling us to the future” (16)
• Dinosaurs. The storyline (and self-published book on dinosaurs), featuring Roberto (aged 8) seemed to me to be at odds with the almost aloof, brooding narrator. Scientists produce evidence to rewrite history.

• “ I am with you and I know how it is “ valedictory reflection. From Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry in Leaves of Grass

Author background & Literary/ Cultural Influences

10:04 is the middle part of a trilogy, with Leaving The Atocha Station and the recently published (2019) The Topeka School . Lerner was a poet first and foremost, and this is apparent in his work both by reference to American poets and as champion of the idea that poets are the great blenders of fiction and non-fiction. (194)
The featured poets in 10:04 are, primarily Walt Whitman, with references also for William Brink, Robert Creeley, John Ashbury, Wallace Stevens..
The Art world is also acknowledged. Marfa, Texas is the location of the Donald Judd, Chinati Foundation and is an artistic retreat. Jeff Koons sculpture also gets a backhanded acknowledgement.
Lerner is very much aware of his literary antecedents and an especially good passage is one in which the author, being consumed by a girlfriend, Alana (she is in complete control of their relationship), muses: “ A match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed" . It’s a working of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway , and the reflected sensuality is perfect once you know the original source of the quotation.

Recommend

Cautiously. The Lerner writing style, and the disjointed series of introspective contemplations of key life moments becomes strangely more and more compelling as the reader tunes in to the density of the writing style, and ambiguity in the messages.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Lerner's first novel, "Leaving the Atocha Station" was one of the most powerful reading experiences I've ever had, largely for purely personal reasons; I started reading that book (set mostly in Madrid and Barcelona) literally a day after I myself had concluded a visit to Spain, and seeing almost all of the places I had just visited serve as the background for that books gorgeous, misanthropic, elegantly sad narration was an extremely potent experience; like having a much more cynical, much more intelligent older sibling whispering a dark interpretation into my ear of some of what I had just experienced on my own. Lerner himself spent time in Spain on a poetry fellowship; the source of much of the novel's inspiration.

His new novel, 10:04 has an even stronger biographical focus than his first one. We follow the narrator, an up and coming writer and poet living in New York, as he wanders around the city in the space between hurricanes Irene and Sandy, the large, faux-meteorolgical apocalypses that shook New York in the last 3-4 years yet failed to produce the great post-9/11 disaster that was predicted. Between those storms (whose sense of tension and communal worry/excitement Lerner evokes with a cool, meditative hysteria), we see a young intellectual in full post-millenial flower. He, worries about how to write his second book, tries to conceive a child (first artificially and then in the old fashioned way) with his female best friend, deals with an ambiguously fatal heart condition, simultaneously appreciates and loathes NYC's co-op/ethic food culture, goes to parties at artist colonies, lets an occupy wall street protester use his shower, the sort of experiences that one could imagine almost anyone living in a large city in the last half decade might have.

But what makes this book stand out from the endless and endlessly dull pack of other "slacker-ish young person who lives in New York" novels (which has become something of an entire genre these days), is the depth and calm of his thoughts. Lerner has a meditative style, he is completely unafraid to have his narrator lose himself in a chain of gorgeous, uber-modern reveries about the world we live in, about our perpetual sense of impending crisis, our tangled attempts to live morally and ethically in a time when the ugly truth behind even the most well-intentioned product or practice is just one smart phone search away. And above all, what it means to think on, care about, and create art in the midst of all of these dicey perspectives. His willingness to grapple, sincerely and deeply, with the impossible complexities of issues like these is what makes him, in this reviewers opinion, one of the finest American fiction writers working today.

That being said, 10:04 does have one weakness: Lerner suddenly includes a short story in the middle that was originally published in the New Yorker, and that story has all the typical lack of imagination and brilliance your average New Yorker story does, but which the rest of 10:04 contains in spades. It seems meant to be this sort of cute meta-fictional disruption showing how the narrator (who is not Lerner but sort of also is) fictionalizes his life (and by extension how the actual Lerner does) and the lives of those around him. Maybe there is some brilliant theoretical/aesthetic justification for it; I don't really care because it disrupts a 240 page novel with 20 pages of pathetically neutered pap that reads all the worse considering how scintillating all of the prose surrounding it tends to be. It's simply an authorial decision that doesn't really work.

That single flaw aside, there are many parts of 10:04 that made me actually giggle out loud with the casual brilliance and the sorts of gorgeous musings that refuse easy answers which Lerner seems to have basically mastered. Highly recommended.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I re-read this novel two months after first reading it, to see if it could hold up to a necessarily closer examination. For the most part it did. My level of enthusiasm was certainly lower, but I still greatly enjoyed Lerner’s prose style, ideas, and motifs.

This time around I saw a lot more Kundera in Lerner, in his use of motifs, in the way he structured the novel around set-pieces, and in his narrator’s emphasis on honesty in the midst of playful deception. But the level where the honesty plays out is different. And the content.

The biggest negative I experienced was the fourth section, a visit to an arts retreat that, I thought, was a level below the rest of the novel. On the other hand, I found myself less critical of the ending, and more sympathetic about how hard it is to end a novel like this. I saw the end more as a way to pile up the novel’s motifs and create an interesting impression of circularity.

There are two types of novel: those that improve with each reading and those that get worse. Kundera's novels are among the latter (e.g., in working with the English-language translator on Kundera’s Immortality before it was formally edited, I read it again and again, in three languages, and by the end I couldn’t bear it; thankfully, most of the fiction I edited was of the first type). I found Lerner to be the third type: the novel improved for me in some ways, and got worse in others. All told, it held up pretty well.

Below is my review of the first read, from November 2014:

This novel is an incredible highwire act, in which Lerner eats his cake at one end, and still has it to consume at the other. His tongue is often in his cheek, and yet there’s a lot serious going on, and he has (and we have) it both ways.

Lerner wants readers to see things differently, not just through the usual metaphors, but also through self-contradictory views and approaches, which sometimes take the form of sentence-long oxymorons. There’s a touch of Nicholas Mosley, as well as of Frederic Raphael, which is to say that the novel often feels more British than American and can seem (or be) too much or too precious at times. But the risks Lerner takes mostly pay off, or at least they did for me.

Temporality is important to the novel, as its title suggests (and its reference to the film Back to the Future suggests the novel’s focus on self-contradictions or bringing opposites together). It’s also a novel of images as well as time, with photographs sprinkled throughout. Of course, the two often come together, as in the film The Clock and a reference to “two temporalities collapsed into a single image.”

This is a novel that manages to be both broad in the topics it touches on and extremely self-reflexive (Whitmanesque and yet not). It sometimes seems as if one of Lerner’s goals was to take self-reflexiveness to its summit, its apotheosis and, possibly, bring an end to it. At least, one wonders where it will go from here, not to mention where Lerner will go from here.

My favorite sequence involves his girlfriend’s Institute for Totaled Art. What a way to satirize the art world! “I held a work from which the exchange value had been extracted, an object that was otherwise unchanged ... an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price.”

How does one bring such a novel to a close? I didn’t feel that Lerner successfully accomplished this very difficult operation. But I’d have to read it again to be sure. And I probably will, although not right away.

If Lerner can move on from here, he might become the leading novelist of his generation. I’m rooting for him.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

You think you have problems? Ben, the narrator of Ben Lerner's sarcastic, intelligent new novel, 10:04, has you beat. While he's struggling to write a follow-up to his first novel now that he's gotten a generous advance, New York is under threat of two serious hurricanes (Irene and Sandy), and his longtime best friend wants to have a baby with him—whether he wants to be involved or not. Oh, and at any time, his aorta could rupture, so he's convinced himself he has every symptom imaginable.

10:04 follows this tumultuous time in Ben's life. But more than merely a litany of his problems, this book is a razor-sharp meditation on our socially hyper-aware yet pretentious culture, as he skewers the literary world, social movements, and fine dining. (Believe me, if you've ever been so inclined before, this book may make you swear off eating octopus for a while.) This is a novel-within-a-novel, so at times you're not sure whether Ben is recounting what is actually happening or fictionalizing what is happening to the Ben-like character in his novel.

"Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, 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."

The above quote demonstrates Ben's (and Ben Lerner's) preoccupation with the blurred line between the present, past, and future. (10:04 refers to the time that Marty McFly returns to the past in the movie Back to the Future.)

Some books hold you in their thrall with gripping plot and characterization, while some mesmerize you with their use of language and narrative. This book definitely falls into the latter category. Lerner's writing dazzled me at times, and while the plot wasn't always easy to follow because of the blurring between fact and fiction, I couldn't stop reading because I was so impressed by his talent. Here's another example:

"Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, their air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine."

This is a fascinating, thought-provoking, often funny book. It's not an easy read, because Lerner's writing is densely packed (although not in a bad way), but it's definitely a worthwhile read.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a pleasure this was to read. Like The Great Believers, it feels, in the best way, like A Proper Novel: everything about it is just so effortlessly good. It gives the impression of having been meticulously assembled and edited while retaining its, for lack of a better word, readability. I've tended towards weariness with autofiction recently, but this is a fine example of how to do it beautifully. I loved the stories-within-stories, loved the repeating phenomenon of the 'world rearranging itself'. Even though 10:04 references Lerner's previous novel – Leaving the Atocha Station – a lot, it's so different, so much more mature, that I kept feeling surprised whenever I remembered they were both written by the same person. Anyway, I don't have anything particularly illuminating to add to the conversation about this book – just that I loved it, and I'm now really looking forward to The Topeka School.

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