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"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from Leaving the Atocha Station's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious. cracklingly intelligent. and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives"--… (more)
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The 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.
He is writing to us from another universe, which is actually all too familiar: it is the basically the same NY 'elite' art scene as ever--the Algonquin Round Table recirculated, retooled, but somewhat staler. Gallery openings, soirees hosted by famous editors attended by literary elite. Trips to museums and art-house theaters all of which provide food for the narrator to chew on and muse about. He supposedly holds a teaching position at a university, but when? one wonders, because we mostly see him perambulating the streets talking to his best friend, drinking too much wine with her. When he's not doing that he's sleeping with brilliant artists and attending counseling for his anxiety, and then going to doctor's appointments to diagnose his semi?-serious heart condition. We don't see him stressing about the cost of his treatments, nor complain about his dayjob: he doesn't bitch about his pay, he doesn't grouse about grading, doesn't mention the inordinate amount of messages from students. Once he meets a troubled student in his office to offer (spiritual?) counseling, but when he opens the office, he realizes he hadn't been there for most of a season, and had accidentally left the windows open.
His seeming lack of concern about money is explained on the first page: he has received a sizable advance on an unwritten book, and this has assuaged all monetary concerns. But as much of the book consists of reflections on periods of time prior to this windfall, and his bourgeois professional relationships (whose maintenance is incredibly expensive in NYC) predate his big-figure sum, it is safe to assume that this narrator has always had the luxury of not caring about money. Now he just REALLY has this luxury. When he grows tired of New York, he takes a funded residency in Marfa, TX where he mostly secludes himself, but where he also visits an art exhibit and a subsequent art party where he consumes too many drugs. He goes slightly mad and writes some terrible poetry about Mexicans on the roof, and he thinks about Walt Whitman's genius.
In other words this guy, Ben Lerner/his narrator is a WRITER and WRITING is his LIFE. His life is what he WRITES about, so he WRITES about WRITING and thinking about WRITING, and his troubles with WRITING, and people criticizing his WRITING, and how his familiars respond to their appearances in his WRITING, etc. He WRITES to blur the lines of fact and fiction, and then WRITES to tell you he is aware that he is doing this.
The world is suffering, and so his Ben Lerner's narrator, but not in the way the world is suffering. He is relatively immune from the world's suffering. The impending cataclysm threatening New York City doesn't arrive the first time and doesn't touch the narrator the second. He occasionally touches the suffering of others, as when he offers his shower to an Occupy protester, or volunteers at a local school, but mostly he is within himself, "dissecting" on the streets of NY, contending with the anxious-poetic logorrhea that makes up his inner monologue, waiting for "the world to rearrange itself around him."
He suffers from anxiety. And this is something the Ben Lerner writes about very well and believably: he effectively traces the contours of anxious thinking, and demonstrates (somewhat worrisomely) its aesthetic value, insofar as one concedes that his work has artistic worth.
Readers used to DFW (that unflinching writer of anxiety) may not approve this treatment of the subject. DFW's anxiety is never glamorized; it is always an impediment. DFW doesn't confuse his anxiety for his genius. In 10:04 the author so thoroughly confuses fact and fiction that one simply cannot tell what he is doing. If Lerner is speaking the truth about anxiety--and it seems to me at times he really does--then bless his heart for writing through it, and writing quite beautifully about it. But if it is fiction, and he is using anxiety as a ploy to display his neurotic genius (the very source of it!), then I am fairly off-put. It would be another annoying "writerly" [read: self-indulgent] exercise.
I really can't tell which it is, and this ambiguity makes the book much more interesting and complex. But I thoroughly sympathize with all who find Lerner annoying. I can see why. He's a self-obsessed, highly intelligent, privileged white male writing about New York City. How many portraits of New York by coddled, ivy-league educated aesthetes do we really need? Maybe we don't need one more. But it is "his" [read someone's] perspective, he's entitled to give it, some publisher bought it, and he renders it well. I suspect that the author has come to terms with the alienating aspects of his work, and the reader's annoyance is anticipated and part of the story.
The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, NPR, Vanity Fair, The Guardian (London), The L Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement
It was also the winner of The Paris Review‘s 2012 Terry Southern Prize and a finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award.
It’s another that I found only ‘meh”. Again, I think perhaps I’m too old.
3½ stars
As for the narrative, such as it is, it seems to a gently ruminative fictionalisation of what appear to be genuine episodes in Lerner's life. At times it seems to resemble an episode of Seinfeld as much as anything; nothing much happens. The author's friend Alex wants him to be the sperm donator to her IUI baby; why she should want this seems unclear as the author appears to be feckless, nervous and paranoid. But it does lead down some interesting byways about modern family and parenthood - and the scene at the "mastabatorium" is both funny and, as I can attest having attended one of these facilities myself, true. Why do they always seem to employ such very attractive nurses?
To fund the process, the author intends to write a book. This is it we are reading now. Whether the advance was as massive as that suggested in the text, only Lerner and his agent can know. Partially this is because of a story printed in the New Yorker. Lerner had a story printed in the New Yorker. Its included here, as part of 10:04. You get the idea
There are a lot of references here to Back to the Future, including the title. Not having seen these films, I can't really comment on how these relate to the book but I'm sure everyone else will. None the less, even without this probably vital knowledge, I enjoyed 10:04 a lot more than I thought I would, whilst still occasionally noting how appropriate the term ivory towers would be for him and most of his characters
Can you accept that this novel is also (occasionally) cruel? Brutal? Deflating?
The most brilliant novel I’ve read this year. The most depressing novel I’ve read this year.
”Meta" is not usually in my vocabulary. But if here it is defined as "twisted turning to amuse the writer and
He is diagnosed with Marfan syndrome (maybe, or an unruptured aortic aneurysm) and receives a fellowship to live for a short time in Marfa, Texas.
Somehow it all adds up to a pile of amusement and an intensely enriching vocabulary lesson, without snark.
In the end this book is about love and art, intimacy and detachment, taking chances, and the ways in which transient moments of light and darkness (actual and metaphorical) change the world that is New York. I really loved the read for the most part. Every once in a while it got too pretentious even for me, but mostly it was a thing of beauty.
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10:04 started off with a brilliant description of two friends preparing for the impending "storm of the century" and the subsequent "lunch-down-let-down" when the storm turns out to be not much of anything. The novel ends with
These two chapters were amazing. It was everything in between that drove me nuts. The writing was so self-conscious, it felt as if the author was attempting to try every new-age writing gimmick available, and it was tiresome. I also could do without the nine syllable words - I still read from paper, I don't need spend half my time looking up words I have never seen before. I am not impressed that you can use a thesaurus. Addressing the reader directly takes me, the reader, out of the story and into the zone of "annoyed". Placing a short story that is almost a retelling of the novel itself into the novel is a great teaching exercise ( now class, take this novel and turn it into a short story..) but here it seems like the author was being paid by the word.
There was some really brilliant stuff in the pages of this book, but there was also so much blather, and the two pretty much cancelled out one another.
I couldn’t help
What does it mean to remove yourself from the world – to seek a mutual abandonment of any such relationship with the outside – and yet find yourself forced to confront individuals who terrorize and demand the ultimate of it? And what does it mean when the world suffers a disaster? What is “the world”? What is “society”? At what point does a collection of individual people become a “society”? And how can such a vaguely-defined entity experience (the rest of) the world?
Lerner confronts many of these themes – self-cloistering, art as life / life as art, and shared-society disasters – but wonders more about how a person projects one’s self into the world, and how people act in, around and through the particulars.
And more fundamentally: What does it mean that moments advance through time? What does it mean that people advance though space? How do people interact through time, with time, against time, and in defiance of it? How do the artifacts of the world around us represent the results of past activity, or the promises of future results?
In “Mezzanine”, Nicholson Baker deconstructs a single act in such painfully excruciating but exuberantly brilliant detail that Proust himself would have needed to rest between chapters. Lerner is highly observant himself, and also quite keen to find connections between all manner of people, places and things.
But Lerner’s observations here are never as obsessive-compulsive as Baker’s in Mezzanine. They are deeply insightful, however, and lend support to his interest in illustrating the ways people project themselves through the many dimensions of the world.
The theme’s third leg is the exploration of fiction and reality. He discusses a book advance. His book advance. He prepares a treatment, and submits it to his publisher, but isn’t exactly sure he intends to finish it. (He writes many times of freely spending his advance on non-writing activities).
The book itself – meaning the one he has promised with questionable intent to the publisher – is a false epistolary document of the deleted email correspondence of the poet William Bronk, as if an executor had chosen, like Kafka’s, to publish the writings instead of burning them.
But his treatment of the material is problematic, not least of all because he's not even sure Bronk used email all that much. Nor is Lerner’s narrator too keen on solving the problems he faces. So he writes the current book instead. By which I mean this book, the one entitled 10:04. The one where he discusses writing it instead of the promised one.
Which makes this book a documentary of its own writing, and Lerner’s narrator an agent of himself! But wait! Lerner is spending so much of the book discussing fiction and reality that we need to wonder where the line is. There are passages in this book where I almost laughed out loud because I had completely forgotten which version of reality I was supposed to be keeping in mind at that point in the text.
As to plot, the book is certainly event-driven, and the characters do develop in time, but it is not strongly plotted nor dramatically structured. There is no climax as such, no denouement. Only plenty of drama. Navel-gazing, if you must.
Like DeLillo he starts the story at one point in time, and ends it at another, hopefully illustrating enough of his theme that the reader leaves satisfied. I’m not sure if I’m satisfied by the totality of the book – I don’t know that I put the book down after the last page and issued a final exhalation of satisfaction – but I am glad to have given thought to the issues Lerner raises, and I have a feeling I will return to this book again.
Lerner is a master craftsman of prose, and a fine turner of phrase. He is also a published poet, which may explain his facility with the language (tho I admit I entirely disliked the real-Ben-Lerner poem sandwiched inside the text at one point). This is both a writer’s-writer’s book and a reader’s-reader’s book. If you’re in either of those categories, it will be a great joy to read.