10:04: A Novel
Ben Lerner, 2014
256 pp.

Book Review by Molly Lundquist
November, 2014
It's hard to tell where you stand in a Ben Lerner work, especially his newest—a dazzling and dizzying read.
  ♦ Is Lerner the first-person narrator? (Mostly...maybe.)
  ♦ Is this a work of fiction? (Yes. No... Yes.)
  ♦ Is the narrator/author/Ben Lerner going to die? (Who knows.)
  ♦ Is New York City going under water? (Yes and no.)
  ♦ Is the world ending? (Feels like it could...or should.)
  ♦ What's the time? (One of the book's big questions.)

If you're wondering what the book could possibly be about, you're hardly alone. Yet its mind-bending quality is what makes 10:04 so compelling—in turn hilarious, thought-provoking, and perplexing.

The basic gist is this: a young male writer living in New York—who has achieved a certain fame and who might have fatal heart condition—is asked by his best friend Alex to help her have a baby. As the narrator moves in and about New York, he contemplates time and identity, art and reality—and how none of it rests on solid ground, not even the city itself, which might soon be submerged in flood waters.

10:04 is heady stuff, with a babushka doll structure—stories nestled within stories. It even dips into meta fiction as when the narrator tells his brother that no, Ari won't be joining join them that evening: "she isn't in this story."

Another of the stories involves Noor, who learns that her recently deceased father was not her biological father, that she is, in fact, not half-Lebanese—an entire identity she'd built around that ethnic heritage. But now that identity, her sense of self, has collapsed. Who is she? Is she the same as she was? Or is she different?

To complicate matters further, as the the narrator listens to Noor tell her story, he wonders if he might include it in his next book (presumably the one we're reading). So is Noor a "real" person, or is she a fictional construct? All of this is the kind of through-the-looking-glass vertigo on display in 10:04.

Why read 10:04? Because it's smart, funny and exhilarating—even if at times you feel it over-intellectualizes (which it does).

It's about the vitality of art speaking to us across time and space. It's about breaking down the barriers between fiction and reality, between past, present and future—and realizing that life and art are stranger, more fluid, than we imagined.

See our Reading Guide for 10:04