Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is the story, basically, of 10:04 being written, except fiction, not fact: the book’s narrator is an author who’s gotten a big advance for his second novel; he thinks he’ll expand a story of his that was published in the New Yorker (which is itself a story of Ben Lerner’s that was published in the New Yorker, and which appears in this novel in full) but then decides the plot isn’t what he wants to do, after all. (Meanwhile, the novel presents various phrases/images/themes/scenes from that New Yorker story earlier in the narrative, so it’s as if the story is the narrator’s life made fiction.) All of which sounds very meta, and it is. But as Lerner explains in this interview with Tao Lin, this “self-referentiality” is “a way of exploring how fiction functions in our real lives,” a way to write about “how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.” That exploration of the relationship between fact and fiction comes to the fore in several moments in the novel: a character tells the narrator about finding out that the man who raised her (who was Lebanese) wasn’t her biological father, making her identity as an Arab-American feel, if not false, then complicated; another character tells a story about how his college girlfriend lied to him about having cancer; the narrator re-tells a story his father had told him about not telling his then-girlfriend about his mother’s death.
But there’s more going on in this novel than a concern with narrative: there’s also a concern with time/mortality/the future/what kind of world we have created and are creating, and there’s a lot of Whitman, and bits of some other poets, and I guess some plot (largely concerning a) the narrator’s health worries and b) the fact that the narrator’s best friend wants to have a child and asks if he’ll be the sperm donor) and a whole lot of New York City between Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy, in wonderfully specific detail. It is funny to read a book that contains little pieces of the neighborhood where I live: I’m not a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, but I have friends who are, and whose preferred work shift duties are bagging bulk goods in the basement, like Lerner’s narrator. I walk past that BP gas station on Douglass at least three times a week. I can picture the ghost bike in memory of Liz Padilla on the corner of 5th Ave, next to the Israeli restaurant I keep meaning to go back to for brunch. And then of course there’s the broader city, the High Line and Chelsea galleries and the subway and the bridges, the Union Square Whole Foods, the very nice restroom at the SoHo Crate and Barrel: all these different markers of here/now that are vivid to me because it is my here/now (or here/recent past) as well as the narrator’s.
And oh, the language. It’s sometimes over the top, sometimes just gorgeous. Phrases repeat: “for whatever complex of reasons,” “majesty and murderous stupidity,” “stout-bodied passerines.” The book’s first sentence includes a meal that “included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death” (3). The narrator describes the walks he takes with his best friend, “walks through Prospect Park as light died in the lindens; walks from our neighborhood of Boerum Hill to Sunset Park, where we would watch the soft-winged kites at magic hour; nocturnal walks along the promenade with the looming intensities of Manhattan glittering across dark water” (7). The narrator talks about the sense of anticipation before Hurricane Irene, how the city has “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” (18). And mm, I love it when the narrator talks about art, particularly in passages about The Clock by Christian Marclay and one really lovely bit about seeing work by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, which, just, here, read it:
The work was set in time, changing quickly because the light was changing, the dry grasses going gold in it, and soon the sky was beginning to turn orange, tingeing the aluminum. All those window 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. At one point I detected a moving blur on the surface of a box and I turned to the windows to see two pronghorn antelope rushing across the desert plain. (179)
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