(That would be NO: A Journal of the Arts.) He goes on a writer’s residency to Marfa, Texas (home of the Lannan Foundation residency that Lerner held). In a significant plot point, he has edited a “small and now-defunct but influential” literary journal which published, among others, Robert Creeley. The narrator’s name, mentioned in passing, is Ben he is 33 years old, the same age Lerner was in 2012. On the most basic level, Lerner goes out of his way to equate himself with the narrator. Whereas typically this concern is subtext, in 10:04, this blurred division becomes the primary subject of the novel. This is far from a unique concern, and to varying extents may be fundamental to the medium of fiction - how much of Woolf is in Clarissa Dalloway? to what extent is Stephen Daedalus fictionalized? - but here it is taken to the extreme. The structure and premises of the book, as well as much of its content, work actively to confuse the distinction between author and narrator, fiction and autobiography. More than anything else, the book is preoccupied with its own genesis. Despite these narrative trappings, the book is primarily concerned with more conceptual matters: what is the place of art in an age of monetization? Why do we tell stories, and does reality change just a little when they aren’t true? How stable is this thing we call the self?
The book is set in New York City, between 2011’s Hurricane Irene and 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, during which time the narrator is diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome (and its attendant risk of aortic rupture) agrees to be the sperm donor for his closest platonic friend dates a thrilling but dispassionate young artist attempts to tutor an Hispanic boy from his friend’s elementary school class and attends a writers’ residency in Marfa, Texas (no relation). The plot, if you can call it that, depicts the basic events and relationships of a year in the life of an author trying to fulfill his contract by expanding a short story into a novel. Ben Lerner’s latest novel, 10:04, is an elegant, confounding meditation on the role of literature in a postmodern age.
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