10:04 (Lerner)

10:04
Ben Lerner, 2014
Faber and Faber
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780865478107


Summary
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child.

In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called “hilarious...cracklingly intelligent...and original in every sentence,” Lerner captures what it’s like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1979
• Where—Topeka, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—Believer Book Award; Terry Southern Prize
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Ben Lerner has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists at present for several reasons, one being that he's akin to a young Brooklynite version of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. That is, in his books, little happens, yet everything happens. Small moments come steeped in vertiginous magic…In 10:04, he's written a striking and important novel of New York City, partly because he's so cognizant of both past and present. He's a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman, but also with writers up through Teju Cole…
Dwight Garner - New York Times


[F]requently brilliant…. Lerner writes with a poet's attention to language, and manages to make his preoccupation with identity more than solipsistic. His failure to make the Lerner who is experiencing things coincide with the Lerner who represents himself on the page and in the social world starts to feel, if not quite heroic, then certainly a matter that concerns all of us, as we obsess over our profile pictures and work out at the gym.
Hari Kunzru - New York Times


Just how many singular reading experiences can one novelist serve up?... 10:04 is a mind-blowing book; to use Lerner’s own description, it’s a book that’s written "on the very edge of fiction."... Lerner obviously loves playing with language, stretching sentences out, folding them in on themselves, and making readers laugh out loud with the unexpected turns his paragraphs take.... 10:04 is a strange and spectacular novel. Don't even worry about classifying it; just let Lerner’s language sweep you off your feet.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR


Ingenious.... Lerner packs so much brilliance and humor into each episode. Some, like the narrator’s blunders while making his donation to a hospital fertility specialist, are worthy of Woody Allen in their comic neurosis. Others yield sparkling essayistic reflections on the blurred lines between art and reality.... This brain-tickling book imbues real experiences with a feeling of artistic possiblity, leaving the observable world "a little changed, a little charged."
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


[Lerner’s] concerns wrap around the modern moment with terrifying rightness.... 10:04 describes what it feels like to be alive.
John Freeman - Boston Globe


At 240 pages, his new novel does not announce itself as a magnum opus. But given Lerner’s considerable humor, rigorous intelligence, and shred breed of conscience—his bighearted spirit and formal achievement—it is. A generous, provocative, ambitious Chinese box of a novel, 10:04 is a near-perfect piece of literature, affirmative of both life and art, written with the full force of Lerner’s intellectual, aesthetic, and empathetic powers, which are as considerable as they are vitalizing.
Maggie Nelson- Los Angeles Times


Lerner writes rich, ruminative fiction.... Like Whitman, and like W. G. Seabld and Teju Cole, Ben Lerner is a courageous chronicler of meditative ambulation, of the mind reflecting on its own vibrant thinking processes before they congeal into inert thoughts.
Steven G. Kellman - San Francisco Chronicle


Lerner explores the connections between contemporary life, art, and literary writing.... Lerner’s insistence on showing off his skill...sometimes results in overwrought constructions that detract from the narrative momentum, but readers who can overlook the sluggish start will be rewarded with engaging streams of thought and moments of tenderness.
Publishers Weekly


There's plenty of dry wit in 10:04 and some laugh-out-loud moments too.... But as in his first novel, Lerner's chief tone is somber.... At times he seems to strain to make scraps of experience...relevant to his themes, but few novelists are working so hard to make experience grist for the mill. Provocative and thoughtful, if at times wooly and interior
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)