“10:04” by Ben Lerner

Lerner has autobiographical fiction down. This novel is primarily about him struggling to write this novel. “I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work, that like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.” At this novel’s crux is a previously published New Yorker story embedded complete within it. That story’s real world literary strength was supposedly how Ben, the narrator, was given a six figure advance for this very novel. Sometimes it gets even more meta, as when the embedded New Yorker story references its author, Ben, reflecting on his first novel’s narrator, who is also a sometimes-less-than-flattering version of Ben (but named Adam). “He’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical…. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.” Ben, this novel’s narrator, is most definitely a gentrified Brooklynite. “I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river.” He is also an unabashed hipster—a supporter of Occupy Wall Street and a member of his local food coop. “As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.” But he also wants to show he is not one of those hipsters; he is not too cool for school (and still has his Midwestern charm). “I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar.” Some of his best stories are memories of his youth, which serve as asides on topics he is mulling over as his present narratorial self. “In the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time.” Pages later, he returns to the riff. “Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence…. I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.”