10:04 by Ben Lerner

I'd been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I'd proposed with the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction, nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.

Adam, Ben Lerner's stand-in (who also appears as a teenage debater in The Topeka School), begins 10:04 by discovering that he has a possible dissection in his heart that may kill him. The specter of death, both certain and uncertain, hangs behind the other dilemmas of his life that are, if not smaller, of obviously less permanent import. Existential questions have a way of doing that. When not worrying about the secret machinations of his body, Adam is a budding writer who has had a successful story in the New Yorker, and his attempts to think through an expansion of the story into a novel are squeezed by the pressure of a successful follow-up. At the same time, his best friend Alex has decided she wants to have a child, and wants Adam to provide the sperm sample.

First, about that: though Alex is clear that Adam can be a involved with "the child" as he wishes, the arrangement suggests a newfangled, perhaps diminished, version of the nuclear family. Which is fine, because the nuclear family hasn't proved to be all that helpful recently. Adam's feelings about the "donation" are complicated by the threat of his sudden death, and the need for legacy-leaving, as well as his own latent romantic feelings for Alex. Though what's offered to Adam isn't quite "fatherhood" in a familiar sense, the novel offers several childlike stand-ins for him to practice upon: Roberto, the elementary school-aged child Ben helps to research and write a book about dinosaurs; a young intern in Marfa, Texas who does too much cocaine and who needs safekeeping; Calvin, an advisee in Adam's poetry program who mistakes his own mental breakdown for poetic inspiration. In each of these cases, Adam is only moderately successful as a father figure, though never a failure, and the partial quality of each relationship seems like a trial run for the possibility of having a child with Alex.

How much of this is "real?" The dinosaur book, charmingly reproduced here, is actually the work of Elias Garcia, a kid Lerner really did mentor, but we are told that in all other ways "Roberto" is a fictional creation. Likewise, the New Yorker story is real, and we tend to believe Ben/Adam when he says that the book in our hands is the product itself, though if Ben is not quite Adam and Adam is not quite Ben, it's puzzling to wonder how the two of them ended up creating the same book. Lerner really is one of the very best at the sort of "autofiction" that dominates the literary consciousness today (see, for example, Annie Ernaux's recent Nobel Prize), because the lines between the real and the fictional are so blurred, and because the blurring of the lines becomes the actual subject of the novel. That sounds tedious, maybe, but Lerner does it so well.

We get to see several versions of "Adam": the fictionalized version, for example, that becomes the writer character of the story, and we see Alex's resentment when she sees that something she's said has become fodder for Adam's fictional life. But these are only layers beneath which an inaccessible "real" Lerner also lies. He calls it a "flickering" between fiction and nonfiction, and the comparison to poetry, I think, is the key to much of Lerner's work. But I also see a metaphor of threads which are tied together, both fictional and nonfictional, and which resemble what I see as the key strength of Lerner's prose: the ability to combine vastly different threads--Superstorm Sandy, modern art, fossils, whatever--into something that works without forcing.

Maybe I've got DeLillo on the brain because we're reading White Noise in my junior class, but I see a lot of him in 10:04: The (real-ish) Institute of Totaled Art, which displays masterpieces whose damage makes them unsellable, seems right out of one of DeLillo's consumerist critiques. And the dissection that lives within Adam like a time bomb seems to me a novel revision of White Noise's Jack Gladney, who must live with the statistical certainty of his own death after the "Airborne Toxic Event." (Side note: the punning between "Marfan Syndrome," which Adam's doctors suggest he may have, and the residency he takes up in Marfa, Texas is so under-played to be almost unnoticeable. If Lerner hit that note any harder the book would tip over into parody, but he pitches it just right.) Like DeLillo, Lerner seems to me one of the few novelists with something really convincing to say about "the way we live now." The hyper-contemporary details, like the scene during Superstorm Sandy, or Occupy Wall Street, which would seem desperately faddish in another author are convincing here. The unconventional possibilities of Adam's life begin to seem like a way forward into a new world, leaving behind the forms which led us into the kind of crisis that hangs, like Marfan Syndrome or an aortic dissection, over everything.