10:04

Say that it was standing there that 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.

The narrator of 10:04 is named Ben, and like its author Ben Lerner, he has recently had a small-press novel receive critical and commercial success, had a short story published in The New Yorker (here), is a teacher at Brooklyn College, self-published a children's book with a Latino immigrant boy, and they were both born in Topeka, Kansas in 1979. But any similarity between them is completely coincidental. I learned about this book at the same time as I read about Karl Ove Knausgård's A Death in the Family, and while they are the same kind of offering (fictionalised memoirs used to break apart the conventional novelistic form), Knausgård's book concentrates on his inner life while Lerner's is more superficial -- using the autobiographical details as the sketchiest framework on which to hang musings about art and literature and the perception of reality in our pre-apocalyptic time of a narrowing future. Ben likes to talk directly to the reader:

Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces were fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of bundling features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and chin? He could, of course, enumerate features: gray-blue eyes, what they call a full mouth, thick eyebrows that she was probably careful to have threaded, a small scar high on the left cheek, and so on. And sometimes these features did briefly integrate into a higher-order unity, as letters integrate into words, words into a sentence. But like words dissolving into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and plots, combining these elements into a face required forgetting them, letting them dematerialize into an effect, and that somehow never happened for long with Hannah, whom he was now beside.

So with a flickering between fiction and nonfiction, 10:04 (the time on the clocktower when Marty McFly is sent into the past in Back to the Future), we begin by meeting Ben and his best-girl-friend Alex, learning that she will need to have her wisdom teeth removed, that, approaching 37, Alex would like to (platonically) have Ben's baby, and join them in anticipating the landfall of Hurricane Irene in NYC. We learn that Ben has had a successful novel, and based on that and the New Yorker story, there has been a bidding war for his next novel, bringing him a huge advance, and he wants to write a fake memoir filled with faked correspondence from dead literary figures. The next section is the New Yorker story, included in full, in which Ben is the one who needs to have his wisdom teeth removed. Of course that's what novelists do -- collect stories to reinterpret as fiction -- and so far as I was concerned as a reader, these anecdotes were some of the most interesting parts of this book: Ben's father going to his girlfriend's father's funeral on the same day his own mother dies, unwilling to bring up his own grief; Alex's step-father's experience with a college girlfriend's cancer; a co-worker at a food co-op telling Ben about her questionable paternity. When 10:04 is moving the plot forward, many interesting things happen, but Ben's all-too-often big-wordy digressive meditations became irksome to me:

So this is how it works, I said to myself, as if I’d caught an ideological mechanism in flagrante delicto: you let a young man committed to anticapitalist struggle shower in the overpriced apartment that you rent and, while making a meal you prepare to eat in common, your thoughts lead you inexorably to the desire to reproduce your own genetic material within some version of a bourgeois household, that almost caricatural transvaluation of values lubricated by wine and song. Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic -- your bathroom -- into the commons leads you to redescribe the possibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. All of this in the time it took to prepare an Andean chenopod. What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and co-construct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.

Eventually, as apparently happened in real life, Ben the character takes up a five week writer's residence in Marfa, Texas, and although he is supposed to be using his time to work on his novel, he is inspired to return to his first love, poetry. This is germane to his writing philosophy:

(W)hat I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.

Apparently Marfa-in-the-middle-of-nowhere is a major artistic center in the States, and while he's there, Ben is dragged along to an installation of conceptual artist Donald Judd's "cubes", and I must confess that, in Lerner's description, they sound intriguing in a way that modern art rarely does to me (for example, the multimedia cubes devised by Siri Hustvedt in The Blazing World) . He reads Whitman and attends an artsy drug-fuelled party and records everything in the poem he's working on -- and this is often in a "I did this and saw this and felt this" narrative that is then nearly literally transcribed as poetry, often only the line breaks showing where one ends and the other begins -- and the following is an example of this (and a kind example because the snippets he shares rarely include poetic insight):

Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67
are paranormal, others dismiss them as
atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections
of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss
what misapprehension can establish, our own
illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?
They've built a concrete viewing platform
lit by low red lights which must appear
mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and then gaze back, an important trick because
the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and the I.

In addition to the poems and the New Yorker story, this book includes photographs and a complete four page children's book about the fraudulent history of the Brontosaurus; 10:04 is sort of a multimedia cube in itself. The book ends in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which didn't affect Ben and his Brooklyn neighbourhood, so there's a mixed message about whether these are the end times or not (but with many, many references to climate change and conspiracy theories put into another character's mouth, it's pretty clear what Lerner himself believes). So that was all very clever and I'm happy for Lerner if he's raking in the big bucks, maintaining his position as the toast of New York, but this whole post-modern-ivory-tower-elitist non-book reads like an exercise for his own amusement and there was nothing that I could take away from it for myself. I keep reading that the novel as a form is dead but 10:04 can't be the future.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that 10:04 was on the Man Booker Prize's long-longlist -- it's annoyingly alternative in the same way that many of the shortlisted titles  were (How to be both, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves). I know that's an aggressive stand I made saying this "can't be the future" of the novel, but that's only because I fear it is. Sigh. Lerner feels like he's gone the Parklife way of Russel Brand; using big words and obscure ideas to confuse people into conflating density with gravity.