Lerner figures as the protagonist of his own book, in which he writes the novel he is simultaneously narrating. So while the novel is largely defined by its lack of unity of plot, the scenes, however far removed they are from each other, stand alone, and are striking in their humor and wit. We pass through his life in New York, his residency in Texas, back in time to meet his mentors, and even leap forward into multiple projected futures. We are with the writer as he washes his hands again and again after worrying that his pants (which have touched the D-line train seats) and the remote used to navigate the clinic’s digital library of “visual stimuli” will contaminate his sample. It is as if we have been invited into a space much more intimate than the writer’s studio: In 10:04, we observe his relationships, his travel to shameful fertility appointments in which he must provide a “sample” for testing in order that his best friend Alex be able to move forward with intrauterine insemination. He is constantly experimenting with form and the limits of plausibility-and breaks these literary conventions by fictionalizing nonfiction-frequently employing apostrophe to blend fiction and nonfiction and to reveal the mechanisms at the writer’s disposal. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, came out to great acclaim in 2011. Lerner, who is first and foremost a poet, is a writer’s writer. It asks of its readers that they allow the traditional structure of the novel-including the presence of plot-to momentarily leave center stage and that they make room for a form perhaps more engaging, one that sings “existential crisis!” Ben Lerner’s new novel, 10:04 (244 page Faber and Faber), is at once nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, a rumination on the relation of the three, a work flickering in the liminal spaces among these forms.
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