by Dish Staff
Critics are raving about Ben Lerner’s new book, 10:04:
Like Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 is a conceptual novel of sorts, by which I mean that it takes what it wants from any number of genres (fiction, poetry, art criticism, autobiography) and corrals the results under the roof of “novel.” Readers and critics less familiar with this approach may spend time wondering about the novel’s taxonomy; those who regularly read and love writers such as Édouard Levé, Hervé Guibert, Violette Leduc, Eileen Myles, Marguerite Duras, W. G. Sebald, Lydia Davis, Fernando Pessoa, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Roberto Bolaño will likely take 10:04 on its own terms, and appreciate its autofictions, its elegant structure (its action is bracketed by two superstorms, 2011’s Irene and 2012’s Sandy), its meticulously constructed sentences, its deployment of poetic tropes (parataxis, refrain, dialogue that floats and rushes, semantic and syntactical leaps that treat the reader like a grown-up), and its facility in analyzing a wide range of political, cultural, and aesthetic artifacts, from Ronald Reagan’s speeches to artist Christian Marclay’s The Clock to Donald Judd’s sculptures to the ’80s hit comedy Back to the Future (from which the novel’s title derives).
Maureen Corrigan calls the novel “mind-blowing,” appreciating that the plot “is way out of the box”:
When 10:04 opens, our narrator and his agent are celebrating at an expensive restaurant in Manhattan. There, they ingest baby octopuses that have been literally massaged to death by the chef. Our narrator tells his agent that he plans to expand his story into a novel by “project[ing] myself into several futures simultaneously … [by working] my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city. …”
That, of course, is also an overview of 10:04 itself, the hyper-aware novel Lerner writes for us. Bookended by two historic hurricanes that threatened New York City (Irene and Sandy), 10:04 projects our narrator into several possible plotlines. For instance, he receives a diagnosis of a serious aortic heart valve problem as he also consents to be the sperm donor for a close friend who yearns to have a baby while he also leaves town for a writers’ retreat in Texas. Lerner’s dazzling writing connects and collapses all these storylines into one.
The effect is thoroughly contemporary:
If fiction, as William H. Gass once wrote, is in the business of creating a reality rather than reflecting one, the reality Lerner creates takes the form of collage, a collection of moments that, in combination and repetition, are recuperated by narrative almost accidentally. It’s like the phenomenon of pareidolia, he suggests: the brain’s tendency to make meaning even among randomness, seeing faces in the clouds. At one point, Alex and the protagonist view Christian Marclay’s The Clock — a twenty-four-hour video montage composed of found footage involving time, by means of which “fictional time [is] synchronized with nonfictional duration.” In its assemblage of “found” text, 10:04 too is written, as it were, in “real time,” both fiercely contemporary — global warming, iPhones, and Wikipedia articles as more than just set-dressing — and a form of time travel, fusing the now of the reading onto the now of the text.
Admitting that “it’s hard to describe a Ben Lerner novel to someone without it sounding kind of terrible,” Emily Temple hails the book as a “meta-fictional masterpiece”:
This novel, which is so much about literary creation and reflection, also feels like the way the mind works: in patterns, in dialogue, in mirrors. Lerner returns again and again to the idea of the world “rearranging itself” around him to allow for new information, new perspectives. We return again and again to certain moments, viewing them through various veils of fiction, of fraudulence. Lerner’s narrator meditates on time flux or lack thereof (the title refers both to Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Back to the Future). The book swirls in on itself, like our minds do. It gets stuck on things. It gets unstuck. It worries. You may not think you need a book to worry for you, but it’s a surprisingly pleasant feeling.
Christian Lorentzen is on the same page:
This is a beautiful and original novel. Lerner’s book is marked by many reminders of death and dying: Ben’s faulty aorta, the ecological turmoil suggested by two superstorms. But 10:04’s prime theme is regeneration, biological and artistic, and it signals a new direction in American fiction, perhaps a fertile one.
The Dish 