Ben Lerner’s “10:04” is a slim, smart piece of meta-fiction about storms, health conditions, children, the publishing industry, and the art world. The novel’s opening line sets the prevailing tone: Lerner and his agent are strolling the High Line “after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.” What they’re celebrating is the sale of what will become “10:04,” building on Lerner’s meteoric rise to cult stardom following his debut novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” and a short story in the New Yorker. This inherently navel-gazing conceit never becomes too obnoxious, mainly on the strength of Lerner’s prose, which shares with Tao Lin a certain obsessive self-criticality, minus the latter’s disaffected flatness. Another close cousin might be Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick,” a book that’s similarly a long, idiosyncratic essay masquerading as a novel.
Lerner’s tactic in the book is to lay bare the mechanics of his craft by flip-flopping between chapters in which he appears as a first-person narrator and as a third-person entity, “the author” — the idea being that we’re suddenly privy to the elisions, adaptations, and reality-tweaks that go into crafting fiction. This tactic works, more or less, but also feels unnecessary at times, because the real joy in “10:04” is its observational asides — on things like the aforementioned octopus, Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” the volunteers at the Park Slope Food Co-op, or Lerner’s own future as a possible sperm donor for his best friend. The novel mixes the overwrought and the colloquial to great comedic effect, and is equally democratic with its cultural references, from John Ashbery to “Back to the Future.” (Watching Dreyer’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” famous for its extreme close-ups of the lead actress, makes Lerner feel as if he’s “Skyping with Falconetti.”) And Lerner isn’t afraid to overshare — about his sex life, or his finances: from “10:04” he “would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars,” he marvels, akin to “around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of ‘Leaves of Grass.’”
Unfortunately, the novel falls a bit flat in its final chapters, in which Lerner travels down to Marfa, Texas for a writing residency. He sleeps during the day, ruminates on John Chamberlain and Donald Judd, snorts ketamine at a party. There are some sharp moments, for sure, including these lines on the famous American Minimalist: “I had never had a strong response to Judd’s work, not that I was any kind of expert. I believed in the things he wanted to get rid of — the international compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space — I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s ‘specific objects’ than any of the other objects I encountered in the world, objects that were merely real.”
But for whatever reason, Lerner — who was an accomplished poet before the success of “Leaving the Atocha Station” — chooses to incorporate long chunks of verse into this section, much of it simply recasting observations he’s already made in prose form. At this point “10:04” starts to feel less like an intentionally diffuse, self-conscious novel and more like a sketchbook of ideas and recollections, culminating in the urban ruin of Superstorm Sandy. Yet it’s ultimately hard to fault this novel for its failures, since it folds back on itself, becoming a novel about the struggle to create something so anachronistic as a novel in the first place. And while “10:04”’s overall structure may be a bit rickety, Lerner proves himself an adept guide to this uneven territory: chatty and cerebral, self-absorbed but also highly empathic, keyed in to the “majesty and murderous stupidity” of our world.
