This book was interesting because it was recursive, a novel about an author writing this novel. The story explores the roles of context and memory in our understanding of reality and fiction, and dabbles a bit with the values created by poetry and art in society. I never really got immersed in the story or cared much for or about the characters, but I enjoyed this book well enough. ( )

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is a poetic meditation on projection – through time and space, through thought and action, and through fiction and reality. It is a brilliant work, requiring careful readers to wrestle with the finely-detailed visions of Lerner’s own self-examinations.

I couldn’t help making comparisons to Don DeLillo and Nicholson Baker. DeLillo writes of urban individuals trying to make deeper connections to the world, and to each other. What does it mean to be a master financier who cloisters himself inwardly in a moving Manhattan limousine as his outer life crashes and burns? What does it mean to make one’s own life and body into a work of art?

What does it mean to remove yourself from the world – to seek a mutual abandonment of any such relationship with the outside – and yet find yourself forced to confront individuals who terrorize and demand the ultimate of it? And what does it mean when the world suffers a disaster? What is “the world”? What is “society”? At what point does a collection of individual people become a “society”? And how can such a vaguely-defined entity experience (the rest of) the world?

Lerner confronts many of these themes – self-cloistering, art as life / life as art, and shared-society disasters – but wonders more about how a person projects one’s self into the world, and how people act in, around and through the particulars.

And more fundamentally: What does it mean that moments advance through time? What does it mean that people advance though space? How do people interact through time, with time, against time, and in defiance of it? How do the artifacts of the world around us represent the results of past activity, or the promises of future results?

In “Mezzanine”, Nicholson Baker deconstructs a single act in such painfully excruciating but exuberantly brilliant detail that Proust himself would have needed to rest between chapters. Lerner is highly observant himself, and also quite keen to find connections between all manner of people, places and things.

But Lerner’s observations here are never as obsessive-compulsive as Baker’s in Mezzanine. They are deeply insightful, however, and lend support to his interest in illustrating the ways people project themselves through the many dimensions of the world.

The theme’s third leg is the exploration of fiction and reality. He discusses a book advance. His book advance. He prepares a treatment, and submits it to his publisher, but isn’t exactly sure he intends to finish it. (He writes many times of freely spending his advance on non-writing activities).

The book itself – meaning the one he has promised with questionable intent to the publisher – is a false epistolary document of the deleted email correspondence of the poet William Bronk, as if an executor had chosen, like Kafka’s, to publish the writings instead of burning them.

But his treatment of the material is problematic, not least of all because he's not even sure Bronk used email all that much. Nor is Lerner’s narrator too keen on solving the problems he faces. So he writes the current book instead. By which I mean this book, the one entitled 10:04. The one where he discusses writing it instead of the promised one.

Which makes this book a documentary of its own writing, and Lerner’s narrator an agent of himself! But wait! Lerner is spending so much of the book discussing fiction and reality that we need to wonder where the line is. There are passages in this book where I almost laughed out loud because I had completely forgotten which version of reality I was supposed to be keeping in mind at that point in the text.

As to plot, the book is certainly event-driven, and the characters do develop in time, but it is not strongly plotted nor dramatically structured. There is no climax as such, no denouement. Only plenty of drama. Navel-gazing, if you must.

Like DeLillo he starts the story at one point in time, and ends it at another, hopefully illustrating enough of his theme that the reader leaves satisfied. I’m not sure if I’m satisfied by the totality of the book – I don’t know that I put the book down after the last page and issued a final exhalation of satisfaction – but I am glad to have given thought to the issues Lerner raises, and I have a feeling I will return to this book again.

Lerner is a master craftsman of prose, and a fine turner of phrase. He is also a published poet, which may explain his facility with the language (tho I admit I entirely disliked the real-Ben-Lerner poem sandwiched inside the text at one point). This is both a writer’s-writer’s book and a reader’s-reader’s book. If you’re in either of those categories, it will be a great joy to read. ( )

4.25 ( )

Ben Lerner, the New York-based poet and author, fictionalizes experiences from his own life in this novel about "Ben," a New York-based poet and author, who is fictionalizing experiences from his own life to write a novel about a New York-based poet and author. What is true and what is fabricated, what is art and its purpose, what is actual past and what is possible future, all swirling against the exhausted background of late capitalism and the climate crisis. ( )

Ho letto questo libro perché, insieme con "Gli anni" di Annie Ernaux e "L'arte di collezionare mosche" di Sjöberg, l'ho visto citato come esempio di testo indicativo della direzione che sta prendendo il romanzo contemporaneo. È sicuramente il più debole dei tre a mio avviso, nonostante una traduzione ottima la quale però non riscatta l'idea di partenza, che è quella di scrivere una sorta di autobiografia romanzata che sconfina nel metaromanzo: si racconta infatti la storia della scrittura stessa del libro. Lo si fa attraverso cinque capitoli quasi slegati tra di loro, o comunque flebilmente connessi, che raccontano la vita e gli ambienti di un intellettuale americano contemporaneo. Alcuni episodi sono anche divertenti o interessanti se presi a sé, ma il tutto veramente non può definirsi romanzo, a meno che la direzione intrapresa non sia quella della dissoluzione del genere. Ciò che manca (a differenza dei due esempi precedenti) è un conflitto, un motore della storia. A me è parso soprattutto un accostamento di aneddoti personali, probabilmente mescolati con elementi inventati. Nel complesso si può leggere, ma non è il capolavoro raccontato in quarta di copertina. ( )