10:04
Ben Lerner
[Granta]
The epigraph for Ben Lerner’s second novel 10:04 is Walter Benjamin’s description of Hasidic beliefs regarding the world to come, where ‘everything will be as it is now, just a little different.’ If Benjamin was famously preoccupied that the mechanical reproduction of art would destroy its ‘aura’ of unique creation, then Lerner answers this concern by infusing his writing with the touch of its maker, but at a ‘different’ slant. His protagonist, who shares many of Lerner’s features (including his name), wanders through multiple iterations of a similar narrative. Each uncanny telling traces his development of a rare health issue, platonically fathering a child with his best friend, co-authoring a short book with a child and composing a novel; supposedly, ‘the book you’re reading now’. Each semi-fiction presents itself as a kind of glitch in the text’s matrix of space, time and identity, asking the reader to perform a constant reassembly of characters and diegeses. These disruptions are both intriguing and challenging, and at times the book can seem a little too smug in its demands. For all the open-endedness of the novel’s structure, Lerner tends towards over-explaining, occasionally getting snagged in self-reflexive opining that is difficult to love.
There are other easy ways to dismiss or dislike this book. It smacks of comfortable middle-class existence, with its attendant ethical dilemmas (Whole Foods market features frequently), and its reference points can be kitschly nostalgic (Back to the Future, the mythical brontosaurus). And yet the flip side of these potential flaws is an earnest and deeply affecting curiosity about media, knowledge and life. The prose bristles with knotty energy, using poetic, scientific and philosophical conventions to convey a fine awareness of being that connects people ‘coevally’ across space and time. Finally, 10:04 moves beyond postmodern cleverness (and stoner metaphysics) towards a re-enchantment with words and the world, charged by the aura of moments where the ordinary becomes strange, alien, mutual. This book is probably important but – more importantly – it’s enjoyable.
Words: Gill Moore
