A Flickering Presence
Ben Lerner, 10:04
Granta, 256pp, £10.99, ISBN 9781847088932
reviewed by James Pulford
Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was an intense trip through the mind of an anxious American college student in Spain and the finest work of fiction to explore feelings of fraudulence and fakery since David Foster Wallace’s story ‘Good Old Neon.’ The narrator is alienated by the disconnect between his experience and his self-presentation – an issue deftly dramatised through the mesh of a foreign language and culture. In 10:04, Lerner’s latest novel, the 33-year old narrator, Ben (a writer from Topeka, Kansas, like both Lerner and the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station), is less adolescent and less caught up in dime-store philosophy, but he’s still neurotic. The issue here is temporality; intimations of mortality are everywhere. However, while Leaving the Atocha Station is resolutely ironic, 10:04 pitches itself at sincerity by unpicking the fabric of time and the utopian promise of fiction.
From the outset of the book, the end is nigh. New York is about to be battered by Hurricane Irene, then Hurricane Sandy. Ben has just been diagnosed with a potentially fatal connective tissue disorder, and he’s been asked to act as the literary executor for his mentors, an ailing elderly couple. Meanwhile, his agent thinks he might get a six-figure sum for his second novel – if he lives long enough to write it – and his best friend, Alex, wants to get pregnant using his sperm via intrauterine insemination (IUI). The tension between life and death runs through every page, spawning a sense in Ben he’s ‘flickering between temporalities,’ that ‘the world [is] rearranging itself’ around him.
Emerging from the subway before the first storm strikes, Ben encounters the stop-start nature of time:
This idea of emancipated time, of disruptions to routine and order, offers a way of thinking about temporality in the novel as a whole. Time is not sequential in 10:04, a point illustrated most obviously by the book’s form. Far from providing harmony or imposing order on time, the five chapters, each with several scenes, frustrate the internal chronology. It is treacherously difficult to pin down the sequence of events, the scenes as murderously intertwined and tangled as the approaching cyclone’s spiralling bands of pressure.
Within the scenes themselves, time is on the slide, the past shunted into the present, the future hurtling backwards. This is apparent when Ben visits his elderly mentors in hospital: ‘all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable…’ In another scene, he’s aware of 'reversing the evolutionary course … running back to the future' as he and Roberto, the eight-year-old he’s tutoring, rally back and forth between the pre-historic exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. Moments of this kind string 10:04 together, creating a sense that the past and future are fictions of the present.
In the opening scene of the novel, Ben and his agent eat at one of the restaurants on the High Line, a regenerated spur of railway track in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. The pièce de résistance is a dish of ‘baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.’ The octopus is a recurring motif in 10:04, its shape echoed by the storms spiralling in off the Atlantic – ‘an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye’ – while its image is apparent again in the ultrasound echo of the IUI baby, ‘the brain visible in its translucent skull.’ More than this, though, the octopus is a figure for the passage of time in 10:04, the key to the chains locked round it. Time is tentacular, reaching into the past, present and future simultaneously, knotted together in messy clumps. When Ben is asked how he’ll write his second novel, he replies: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously.” Later he jokes about writing a book in which “an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time.”
As Ben’s second novel gestates and Alex becomes increasingly desperate to get pregnant, the two plotlines converge. The narrator wants to write a book of fabricated correspondence between himself and a number of famous authors, and he plans to use the advance from it to pay for Alex’s fertility treatments. The set-up is neat: a fiction about a fabricated past becomes a way of funding a possible future. With time branching off in all directions, 10:04 exists in the shadow of Jorge Luis Borges’s masterful work on narrative time, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). In that story an apocryphal text imagines ‘an infinite series of times’ occurring at once, all divergent, convergent and parallel. Ben repeatedly describes the weather as ‘unseasonably warm,’ as though a clock has broken and all of these scenes are being experienced in a moment of supposed ‘nowness’ where everything happens simultaneously. When the absurd realisation dawns on him that ‘for the second time in a year we were experiencing once-in-a-generation weather,’ it’s like several futures are arriving at once.
Whereas art is bound to the narrator’s sense of fraudulence in Leaving the Atocha Station (‘Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artwork and the claims made on their behalf’), the narrator in 10:04 has found a way of thinking about art as a force for good. The move from irony to sincerity is the most obvious difference between Lerner’s first and second novels. Addressing the audience at Columbia’s School of the Arts, the narrator talks of ‘poetry’s power to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship,’ and ‘a palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin.’ Writing cannot organise time or provide it with a definitive order; the best it can hope to do is represent the fractured, chaotic moment when reality is created. There is something profoundly democratic, utopian even, in that idea and its sense of community.
True to the ideas expressed here, 10:04 plays out ‘a collective song with no single origin’ on numerous occasions. One instance occurs when, in a crowded metro station, the words of Ben, his friends, the train announcements, the posters in the station and Rihanna, playing over someone’s headphones, all intertwine. Elsewhere, in the novel’s many interpolated tales, Ben freely adopts the first person pronoun to relate a story he’s heard from someone else without fencing it off in quotation marks. The effect is a striking heteroglossia. Words cut across each other, minds and bodies connect, and a world of many voices emerges, each one corresponding to the simultaneous realities 10:04 embraces.
Like Lerner’s first novel, 10:04 is as good at exploring abstract ideas as it is delivering jokes. When he’s at the museum with Roberto, Ben finds himself desperate for the toilet and ‘at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one’s bladder.’ In another scene with Roberto, Ben has to reassure the boy that the African militia leader and indicted war criminal Joseph Kony isn’t coming to Brooklyn to kill him. Later, he imagines talking to a fictional girl about the cost and processes of IUI. With the kind of easy reasoning unique to young children, she unravels the argument he’s made for why he and Alex should go through with the incredibly expensive lab treatment when neither of them is known to have serious fertility problems.
As a new idea for Ben's second novel develops and he moves away from a book of fabricated letters, he decides to write ‘a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them … an actual present alive with multiple futures.’ This best describes what 10:04 does as a novel: autobiography and fiction meet and mix in the inky shadows, blurring the line between the two. That said, the book’s meta credentials aren’t coat-hangers for the author’s superior intellect or a way of exposing the crummy cornerstone novels are built on; they’re not just a writerly conceit intended to impress MFA bros. (Ben believes ‘art has to offer something other than stylized despair.’) Rather, they show how the atoms comprising what we think of as real life are the same as those used to build the fictions we read, watch and hear. The novel speaks to an idea of an equal society, an order that doesn’t prioritise and monetise time, and while the curtain is never drawn back completely, 10:04 offers a utopian glimmer of the world to come.
From the outset of the book, the end is nigh. New York is about to be battered by Hurricane Irene, then Hurricane Sandy. Ben has just been diagnosed with a potentially fatal connective tissue disorder, and he’s been asked to act as the literary executor for his mentors, an ailing elderly couple. Meanwhile, his agent thinks he might get a six-figure sum for his second novel – if he lives long enough to write it – and his best friend, Alex, wants to get pregnant using his sperm via intrauterine insemination (IUI). The tension between life and death runs through every page, spawning a sense in Ben he’s ‘flickering between temporalities,’ that ‘the world [is] rearranging itself’ around him.
Emerging from the subway before the first storm strikes, Ben encounters the stop-start nature of time:
I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, 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.
This idea of emancipated time, of disruptions to routine and order, offers a way of thinking about temporality in the novel as a whole. Time is not sequential in 10:04, a point illustrated most obviously by the book’s form. Far from providing harmony or imposing order on time, the five chapters, each with several scenes, frustrate the internal chronology. It is treacherously difficult to pin down the sequence of events, the scenes as murderously intertwined and tangled as the approaching cyclone’s spiralling bands of pressure.
Within the scenes themselves, time is on the slide, the past shunted into the present, the future hurtling backwards. This is apparent when Ben visits his elderly mentors in hospital: ‘all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable…’ In another scene, he’s aware of 'reversing the evolutionary course … running back to the future' as he and Roberto, the eight-year-old he’s tutoring, rally back and forth between the pre-historic exhibits at the Museum of Natural History. Moments of this kind string 10:04 together, creating a sense that the past and future are fictions of the present.
In the opening scene of the novel, Ben and his agent eat at one of the restaurants on the High Line, a regenerated spur of railway track in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. The pièce de résistance is a dish of ‘baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.’ The octopus is a recurring motif in 10:04, its shape echoed by the storms spiralling in off the Atlantic – ‘an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye’ – while its image is apparent again in the ultrasound echo of the IUI baby, ‘the brain visible in its translucent skull.’ More than this, though, the octopus is a figure for the passage of time in 10:04, the key to the chains locked round it. Time is tentacular, reaching into the past, present and future simultaneously, knotted together in messy clumps. When Ben is asked how he’ll write his second novel, he replies: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously.” Later he jokes about writing a book in which “an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time.”
As Ben’s second novel gestates and Alex becomes increasingly desperate to get pregnant, the two plotlines converge. The narrator wants to write a book of fabricated correspondence between himself and a number of famous authors, and he plans to use the advance from it to pay for Alex’s fertility treatments. The set-up is neat: a fiction about a fabricated past becomes a way of funding a possible future. With time branching off in all directions, 10:04 exists in the shadow of Jorge Luis Borges’s masterful work on narrative time, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941). In that story an apocryphal text imagines ‘an infinite series of times’ occurring at once, all divergent, convergent and parallel. Ben repeatedly describes the weather as ‘unseasonably warm,’ as though a clock has broken and all of these scenes are being experienced in a moment of supposed ‘nowness’ where everything happens simultaneously. When the absurd realisation dawns on him that ‘for the second time in a year we were experiencing once-in-a-generation weather,’ it’s like several futures are arriving at once.
Whereas art is bound to the narrator’s sense of fraudulence in Leaving the Atocha Station (‘Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artwork and the claims made on their behalf’), the narrator in 10:04 has found a way of thinking about art as a force for good. The move from irony to sincerity is the most obvious difference between Lerner’s first and second novels. Addressing the audience at Columbia’s School of the Arts, the narrator talks of ‘poetry’s power to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship,’ and ‘a palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin.’ Writing cannot organise time or provide it with a definitive order; the best it can hope to do is represent the fractured, chaotic moment when reality is created. There is something profoundly democratic, utopian even, in that idea and its sense of community.
True to the ideas expressed here, 10:04 plays out ‘a collective song with no single origin’ on numerous occasions. One instance occurs when, in a crowded metro station, the words of Ben, his friends, the train announcements, the posters in the station and Rihanna, playing over someone’s headphones, all intertwine. Elsewhere, in the novel’s many interpolated tales, Ben freely adopts the first person pronoun to relate a story he’s heard from someone else without fencing it off in quotation marks. The effect is a striking heteroglossia. Words cut across each other, minds and bodies connect, and a world of many voices emerges, each one corresponding to the simultaneous realities 10:04 embraces.
Like Lerner’s first novel, 10:04 is as good at exploring abstract ideas as it is delivering jokes. When he’s at the museum with Roberto, Ben finds himself desperate for the toilet and ‘at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one’s bladder.’ In another scene with Roberto, Ben has to reassure the boy that the African militia leader and indicted war criminal Joseph Kony isn’t coming to Brooklyn to kill him. Later, he imagines talking to a fictional girl about the cost and processes of IUI. With the kind of easy reasoning unique to young children, she unravels the argument he’s made for why he and Alex should go through with the incredibly expensive lab treatment when neither of them is known to have serious fertility problems.
As a new idea for Ben's second novel develops and he moves away from a book of fabricated letters, he decides to write ‘a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them … an actual present alive with multiple futures.’ This best describes what 10:04 does as a novel: autobiography and fiction meet and mix in the inky shadows, blurring the line between the two. That said, the book’s meta credentials aren’t coat-hangers for the author’s superior intellect or a way of exposing the crummy cornerstone novels are built on; they’re not just a writerly conceit intended to impress MFA bros. (Ben believes ‘art has to offer something other than stylized despair.’) Rather, they show how the atoms comprising what we think of as real life are the same as those used to build the fictions we read, watch and hear. The novel speaks to an idea of an equal society, an order that doesn’t prioritise and monetise time, and while the curtain is never drawn back completely, 10:04 offers a utopian glimmer of the world to come.