10:04 begins and ends with potentially catastrophic storms hitting New York, and is loaded with the narrator’s intimations of a future ice age and the city under water. He later imagines his potential future daughter questioning him on the cost of her creation as contrasted with the pay level of the female actors in the pornography used to facilitate donation: “What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?” His concerns about hand hygiene turn his sperm donation into a looping “Beckettian drama”. His anxiety at being responsible for a young boy causes him to regress and come close to wetting his pants on a trip to the museum. His inability to tell his nephews a bedtime story without becoming embroiled in problems with tense leads to a small panic attack. Like Lerner’s debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, this is an extremely funny book, the narrator’s neuroses providing most of the laughs.

The novel tracks the progress of these two interconnected acts of creation – baby and novel. The spine of this flickering narrative is the decision by the writer to allow his best friend Alex to impregnate herself with his sperm, a costly procedure that will be funded by the publishing advance. His character claims that he wants to work his way “from irony to sincerity” and in the end does not deliver the book on literary fraudulence that he originally proposes, but rather “the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a flickering between them … ” But Lerner’s playfulness does not come from despair or disparagement. A novel about writing a novel a narrator who is and is not the author general metafictional horsing around reflecting both the author’s and reader’s ambivalence about the novel. This may seem tricksy in a way we’ve seen many times before. The second section of the novel consists of “The Golden Vanity”, the New Yorker short story that prompted the narrator’s substantial advance, and which transposes names and details of the story and characters introduced in part one.

As the book opens, the unnamed writer is enjoying an opulent meal with his agent, celebrating the six-figure advance he has secured for his as yet unwritten follow-up: “We were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene … ”

L ike the author himself, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s second novel is a poet who has experienced great critical acclaim for his debut novel.

Ben lerner 10 04 summary