Ben Lerner interweaves real life and literature in his second novel, 10:04

The American writer explores further the fuzzy boundaries between literature and life.

Ben Lerner's second novel is set in a New York that is threatened by devastating storms. iStock photo

Ben Lerner is emerging as one of the most determinedly self-­reflexive of modern novelists: a writer who is captivated by the porous boundary that can’t quite separate literature from life. For Lerner, the novel is a form that invites questions about the nature of literature itself: questions about its making, its makers, about the relationship it bears to the authentic, the real, the self.

These questions are developed in Lerner's second novel, 10:04, which is marked by a preoccupation with the tension between the physical world and the meta­physical world, by the presence and the absence of the past and the future, by different orders and distortions of temporality.

When the novel opens, we join the book's narrator (like the real Lerner, a novelist and a poet) at dinner with his agent. The narrator has just published a short story in The New Yorker called The Golden Vanity (again, like Lerner) and has been offered a six-figure advance to turn it into a novel. Over dishes of baby octopus in what, we are told, "would become the opening scene" of that work, the agent asks how he plans to do so. The narrator does not reply, but imagines himself saying: "I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously ... I'll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman on the vulnerable grid."

What follows is, for the most part, a first-person narrative (although the book questions such categories) in which we witness the negation and the creation of that work. We do so in a New York that is threatened by devastating storms and in which the narrator is under siege from radical anxieties, feelings of inadequacy, a heart condition and a series of episodes that he characterises as “increasingly lacrimal”.

His best friend of six years, Alex, has asked him to father her child. As the story unfolds, shifts in chronology and elegant disruptions of what Lerner calls “a tidy geometrical plot” create a world that is “flickering between temporalities”. Here, literature and life bleed together and time is not a line but a kaleidoscopic unity that shows “the similitudes of the past, and those of the future, corresponding”.

This allusion to, or borrowing from, Walt Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is characteristic of 10:04. This is an intellectually rich, self-consciously literary novel that is in some ways about how we, and our world, have been made by accretions of culture. But it is not a dry or demanding work. A certain degree of careful reading is required, and there are moments when one can feel, to use Lerner's words against him, "bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity".

Yet for the most part, the book is a profound delight. Lerner writes memorably about hypochondria and feelings of inadequacy (doctors “glowed with almost parodic health”; “She [Alex] chose you for your deficiencies”); penetratingly about moving between the various micro-worlds that constitute a city (“the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds … Have you seen people pause in revolving doors like divers decompressing”); evocatively and freshly about weather and memory: “I found it was fully night, the air excited by … the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time.”

Lerner shows that he is capable of sustaining this quality of writing throughout the novel, yet he also knows how and when to modulate, how to change register. His ability to do so, coupled with his command of the temporal structures governing the book, has produced a work that is tender, reassuring, uncanny, on occasion sublime.

Matthew Adams is a London­-based reviewer who writes for the TLS, the Spectator and the Literary Review.