A curious, modern novel that bounces across time and place like its narrator as he navigates the angst of career, imposter syndrome, climate change, decisions on becoming a parent, potential early death, and New York City. It's a very smart and clever book, but also earnest (and potentially autobiographical). The writing is vivid and immediate, yet reflective at the same time. ( )

In 10:04, poet and novelist Ben Lerner has written a novel based on a previously published short story in which an unnamed narrator, also a poet-novelist, attempts to write a novel based on a recently published short story, while the narrator in that story seeks to write a novel from a short story. (Seriously, fiction does not get much more meta than that!) The book—the real one, that is—opens with a Brooklyn-based writer celebrating the success of a story he has published in a prestigious magazine that garners him a hefty advance for a future novel. However, he is uncertain about how to proceed, especially as he faces a health scare—an aortic heart condition—that brings his own mortality into play. His world is further complicated when his best friend asks him to be a sperm donor so that she can conceive a child, a request that leads him to question notions of family, friendship, and legacy. All this unfolds against the backdrop of political unease and climate change—the story is bookended by events surrounding two superstorms that imperil New York City—with references to other historical occurrences that further blur the line between fiction and reality in ways that add complexity to the narrative.

I had a mixed set of emotions when reading 10:04. On one hand, I found the author’s writing to be technically impressive and intellectually stimulating in the way it combined elements of poetry, prose, and meditative essays. (The book is even illustrated in places with various pictures and drawings, which brought to mind a comparison with W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.) Lerner was able to weave seemingly unrelated topics—literature, art, politics, the environment, raising a family, tragic historical events—into a reasonably cohesive tapestry that addresses many of the existential anxieties of the modern age. However, the details of the plot can be dense and the complicated structure of the story was hard to follow at times; this is certainly not linear story-telling, which made it seem more like a literary science project than a sincere effort to leave the reader with a relatable and engaging tale. Overall, this was a novel that I am glad I read, but not one that I can recommend without some hesitation. And, by the way, the novel’s quixotic title does have a logical explanation: considerable portions of the book reference the classic film Back to the Future and that is the exact time when the lightning bolt hits the clock tower and powers Marty McFly back home, thirty years forward! ( )

I'm torn about this book because there were aspects that I really enjoyed only to read on and be disappointed. The beginning started strong with vivid imagery which was only partially marred with a pedantic vocabulary, but then turned prosaic. It followed with an interesting multi-layered narrative which was ruined by a detailed explanation of what was what as though Lerner could not trust his readership to understand (the neither unique nor very sophisticated) structure. Finally the cool distancing of the first chapters turned into navel gazing drivel. So: had potential; did not reach it. ( )

This book was interesting because it was recursive, a novel about an author writing this novel. The story explores the roles of context and memory in our understanding of reality and fiction, and dabbles a bit with the values created by poetry and art in society. I never really got immersed in the story or cared much for or about the characters, but I enjoyed this book well enough. ( )

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is a poetic meditation on projection – through time and space, through thought and action, and through fiction and reality. It is a brilliant work, requiring careful readers to wrestle with the finely-detailed visions of Lerner’s own self-examinations.

I couldn’t help making comparisons to Don DeLillo and Nicholson Baker. DeLillo writes of urban individuals trying to make deeper connections to the world, and to each other. What does it mean to be a master financier who cloisters himself inwardly in a moving Manhattan limousine as his outer life crashes and burns? What does it mean to make one’s own life and body into a work of art?

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. ( )