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.

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy--even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.

There are many risks for a young white man growing up in Topeka, Kansas: meth, for one, and the seductive anger of the Westboro Baptist crew right next door, the inchoate white male rage that lurked in the wings of American life until it ascended to power in 2016. For young Adam, these are forces against which others are marshaled: his mother, for instance, who has become famous writing a book of feminist pop psychology; the Foundation, a renowned psychological institute at which his father works, and where Adam and all his friends seem to receive various forms of psychoanalysis; the armor of being loosely connected to other people, to New York and to Judaism. And debate, at which Adam is one of the best in the country. He's widely expected to win the national championship in "extemp," extemporaneous speaking on a revealed subject.

The Topeka School makes high school look absolutely dreary, which it is. In theory, it's a way of channeling raw human attitudes into intelligible speech, of finding control through words, but in practice, it turns out to be just the opposite. In a typical debate, one party wins by "spreading" their opponent, that is, speaking so quickly and introducing so many arguments that the opponent cannot respond to all of them, thus conceding them. It leads to a kind of gibberish intelligible only to the initiated, and which at times resembles senseless glossolalia. It has its echoes in the word salad of nervous breakdowns, of which the characters in The Topeka School have many. Or with the angry outbursts that come on Adam after a severe concussion. It has echoes, too, in the taboo utterances of "The Men," who call to verbally assault Adam's mother for her writings, with rape threats and filthy words. Can the practices which claim to give order to the world--and sensibility and decency--actually lead to brutality? To social degeneration? To Fred Phelps and Donald Trump?

Adam, who, as the implied author cobbles together accounts from his parents to stitch the novel together, turns out more or less OK. (We see him late in the book channeling his uneasy feelings into poetry, another kind of speech and another kind of order.) But he has a shadow in Darren, another boy who isn't quite a friend. Darren is a patient of Adam's father at the Foundation, a troubled kid who goes from being rejected by his peers to being included in a kind of cruel and ironic way, like a mascot. We know from the beginning of the book that Darren commits a shocking act of violence: he breaks a girl's jaw with a pool ball:

What Darren could not make them understand was that he would never have thrown it except he always had. Long before the freshman called him the customary names, before he'd taken it from the corner pocket, felt its weight, the cool and smoothness of the resin, before he'd hurled it into the crowded darkness--the cue ball was hanging in the air, rotating slowly. Like the moon, it had been there all his life.

What separates Darrens from Adams? Something innate, surely. Darren feels it, the anger that exists before the reason for it, symbolized in the cue ball-moon. And Darren doesn't have Adam's intelligence, though perhaps that's less innate and more contingent than one would like to believe. At the end of the novel, an adult Adam sees Darren among the picketers with Phelps' Westboro Baptist cretins. There are Darrens everywhere, Lerner seems to be saying, and sometimes they look freakish and strange, but sometimes they look like rude parents at the playground, and sometimes they look like ICE agents, and sometimes they look like us.

I was really impressed by The Topeka School. It's a book that seems like it has one too many parts--there's the multiple narrators, the presence of Darren (whose connection to Adam is really, in a plot sense, very tenuous), the Foundation, some stuff about Adam's parents' affairs. A lot of that would seem really ungainly, or perhaps extraneous, if the book weren't cinched so tight by its themes: the brutality of white American masculinity, and its manifestation in language. Lerner handles all this with the aplomb of a poet, used to balancing unlike moments against one another to reveal their secret likeness. I think I liked it a little less than Leaving the Atocha Station, if only because that novel is frequently very funny, and The Topeka School isn't. But few other novels, I think, speak to something as urgent and contemporary.

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely. Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for the outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I'd dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.

Adam Gordon is an American poet on fellowship in Madrid. He tells people that he's there to study, and write poetry about, the effects of the Spanish Civil War. His Spanish is a little rusty, and he's addicted to what he calls "little white pills"; a combination which can have unfortunate consequences, as when he's unable to stop smiling as a woman tells a clearly upsetting story he does not comprehend, which leads to someone punching him in the face. The punch itself is not so bad, honestly; it has an immediacy and a recognizable quality of experience that is different from what really torments Adam, which is the anguish of his own interiority: the distance from experience, the inability to communicate, and the uselessness of words.

Why not stay at home, someone asks him, and write about the United States of Bush? Why come to Spain and write poetry about their fascists? But Adam's fellowship in Spain, we come to understand, is not actually an attempt to face history and experience but to flee from them. His bad Spanish is not actually a problem to be overcome but a safety net. He can utter half-formed sentences and others--especially women--will supply the missing meaning, allowing him to seem in profound or mystical. When he fails to understand the motivations or needs of others, he can blame it on the difficulty of translation; when he is frightened of being understood himself he can retreat into it. Translation in Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a kind of metaphor for the whole experience of postmodern life, and its difficulties legitimize alienation and loneliness.

Adam speaks in the language of critical theory:

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability.

I had a hard time with Atocha at first because I couldn't figure out of this was wholly sincere or if it was parody. Who talks like that? Ultimately, I decided that the answer was both: Adam's alienation and general sad-sackery are real, and the language is both an attempt to make sense of it and to push it away. It wouldn't work at all if it weren't combined with a narrative heavy on farce: Adam, for example, courts sympathy by telling women his mother has died, and then when he accidentally brings her up in conversation, invents a half-dozen other pointless lies instead of coming clean. Language won't really allow us to come clean, Adam seems to tell himself, and while that may be true it doesn't explain why he's such a piece of shit half the time.

The book clicked for me about a third of the way through when Adam hears a story from a friend, by way of text, about an accidental drowning in Mexico. It's somehow both shocking and funny: Lerner's rendition of the text chain is one of the most accurate uses of modern technology I've ever seen in a novel, and it's incredibly pathetic. (How can you tell a story like that when each party has to stop every few lines to say "you still there?") And of course later on Adam steals the horrible story and tells it like it's his own to impress a girl. But the drowning, even filtered through technological hearsay, is the interruption of postmodern alienation by the real.

The same thing happens in the book's late stages when Adam finds himself in the middle of the Madrid train bombings of 2004. What can a poet do to affect history? Probably nothing, Adam admits on a panel, half gleefully because it absolves him of the attempt--but history, reality, experience, violence, these things keep appearing in your life whether your critical apparatus is prepared for them or not. A novel about terrorism and critical theory seems like it ought to be a real drag. It's a credit to Lerner, who is clearly only separated from Adam by the thinnest shade, that Leaving the Atocha Station is both funny and affecting.