As a bookseller, I have found it
difficult to describe Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10.04, in an enticing
way. “There isn’t really a plot… it’s about a privileged
young white man living in New York… He eats a lot of quinoa…”
Already the customer will be wrinkling up their nose at this point.
It’s an understandable reaction, and has been shared by some
reviewers. But I personally cannot recommend it more. I found it
refreshingly honest and candid, and despite such a threadbare plot, I
remained thoroughly engrossed by Lerner’s internal monologue; his
meditations on art, anxiety, memory, and modern life.If there is a plot, let me summarise it as best I can. It is partly a book about writing a book, as the narrator (who seems to be basically Lerner himself) goes about proposing a novel to his literary agent, getting an advance, and then beginning to write the thing during a residency in Marfa in the final section. For the most part though, it is about his life in New York, in which he is grappling with a potential diagnosis of Marfan syndrome between attending art openings, tutoring a delightful young Spanish boy named Roberto, over-preparing for anti-climactic super-storms, and eating baby octopus at fancy restaurants. Meanwhile, he is also coming to terms with his good friend Alex’s proposal that they (clinically, platonically) conceive a child together because she is “thirty six and single… and can’t wait for professional and biological rhythms to coincide”.
I think that we can often underestimate the importance and readability of trivial events. I secretly love reading about characters doing dishes or catching buses, and I realised recently that one of my favourite things about Murakami’s writing is the way he writes about meals. For Lerner, these moments are brought to the forefront and magnified, and are often tinged with profound analysis. Consider this visit to a wholefoods store to stock up on instant coffee before an impending storm:
“I held the red plastic container,
one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it
was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been
harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then
dehydrated at a factory in Medellin and vacuum-sealed and flown to
JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging
and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood
reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced
the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were
threatened…”
At another moment, he describes the way
smartphones have influenced his association of significant events
with geographic locations, as he received news via email or text
while standing in a certain part of the city. Lerner takes in the
privilege and modernity of the world around him so thoughtfully that
it takes away any sort of pretension. The book manages to be
absolutely hilarious at times (the section where he attempts to give
a semen sample at the fertility clinic had me laughing out loud), and
incredibly tender at others (a mild panic attack, an outburst, and a
child’s forgiveness during a museum visit had me near tears, as did
a young man’s freak-out following a large dose of Ketamine).Lerner also plays with form, often slotting in images and other texts throughout the book. One instance of this, and perhaps the most perplexing, is his insertion of one of his own short stories in the middle of the book. The narrator has revealed that he has had a short story published in the New Yorker, and then we are suddenly reading the story itself, which is filled with adapted fragments from his life that we have just been reading about. “Oh, how very meta of you, Ben,” I thought at first. Yet it was an interesting idea, when I thought about it; it makes all kinds of lucid, layered links between life and art, Lerner and 10.04, reality and fiction. It’s great to see a writer taking liberties like this and expanding the possibility of narrative structure.
I think this is a beautiful and wonderfully clever book, and I don’t know if I can put it better than Rachel Kushner, who remarked that it is “a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and vitality”. Come in to Time Out and let me rave about it to you some more!
