The wanderer
In the Hasidic vision of the afterlife, which Ben Lerner appropriates as epigraph to his eagerly anticipated second novel, “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” It is one way of describing the arc of his own new book, whose narrator asks: “What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?” “10:04” is not a work for readers who crave linear plots and narrative progression.
Lerner writes rich, ruminative fiction that gnaws over one idea (time, art, ethnicity, paternity, etc.), moves on to another, and then returns to chew over the first again. With so much munching, it is no surprise that in one dramatic scene, Lerner’s 33-yearold narrator has his wisdom teeth removed. Electing to be totally anesthetized, he avoids suffering but also any memory of the episode. The narrator, called “the author,” recognizes that he is creating a gap, like the intervals between present and future, experience and expression, and Lerner and his narrator doppelganger, that haunt him throughout: “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.”
In a scene that begins the book and to which it returns much later, the author and his agent dine on expensive baby octopus to celebrate a sixfigure book contract. Like Lerner himself, who, after three volumes of poetry, published a critically acclaimed novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), the author is now faced with the challenge of writing a worthy second novel. After many false starts, it will eventually emerge as “the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them.”
“10:04,” which derives its title from the time on the courthouse clock tower at the moment that lightning strikes in the movie “Back to the Future,” is a self-begetting novel, a metafiction that recounts its own genesis. Along the way, the author mulls over several possibilities before rejecting them. One is the story of an author who forges letters from famous writers in order to sell his archive to a library for an inflated price. It would have been a false account of fraud presented as fiction.
Though a summary of “10:04” might make it seem insufferably cerebral, it is in fact heady without being precious, packed with striking, often comic, incidents. They include a visit to the Institute for Totaled Art, a warehouse on Long Island containing pieces so damaged that their owners received full compensation from the insurer. Is it still art? Does it retain monetary value? Throughout the novel, the author vacillates about cooperating with his best friend Alex, a 36-year-old woman who is anxious about her biological clock and wants him to inseminate her artificially. Despite his ambivalence about fatherhood and uncertainty about what his relationship to a child conceived without sex would be, he visits a clinic’s grotesque masturbatorium to provide a semen sample. And he does channel paternal impulses in a disastrous outing to the American Museum of Natural History with a disadvantaged thirdgrader he volunteered to mentor.
screening of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” a video art installation that is a 24hour-long montage of movie clips illustrating successive moments in the day, leaves the author lost in the gap between virtual time and real time — just as his literary project is stranded between the virtual novel he promised his publisher and the real novel that is yet to be born.
The author, who undergoes tests for Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that has nothing to do with Texas, takes up a five-week residency in desolate Marfa, Texas, that proves as much a fiasco as the fellowship year the poet-narrator of “To the Atocha Station” spends in Spain. Instead of writing the novel he was contracted to deliver, he fritters his time away writing flaccid Whitmanesque verse that would have embarrassed the good gray poet of Brooklyn. Back home in Brooklyn, the author, “a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid,” wanders the city streets celebrating — and denigrating — himself and the multitudes he contains. Like Whitman, and like W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole, Ben Lerner is a courageous chronicler of meditative ambulation, of the mind reflecting on its own vibrant thinking processes before they congeal into inert thoughts.