The narrator (also named Ben), on the heels of a first novel that was a critical darling (not unlike Atocha), has just received a six-figure second book deal on the strength of a New Yorker short story ( The Golden Vanity, which actually appears in the summer 2012 issue of the New Yorker and also appears in full in 10:04). Like Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, published by a small Minnesota press in 2011 to astounding acclaim, 10:04 is mysteriously metafictional, a palimpsest of both fiction and nonfiction, peeled back to reveal more and more layers of each. This is not to dissuade the reader from taking up the book altogether, but to say that 10:04 is a selfish work-250 beautifully written pages of Ben Lerner struggling to understand the artistic purpose of Ben Lerner. But is it a book written for writers whose tried-and-true conceit of teetering on “the edge of fiction” is more an annoyance than novelty? 10:04 is for those who can afford to be patient with its denser passages of theoretical musing and the self-effacing anxieties of an academic. Though slim, it is not a book to speed through at the risk of missing out on the pleasures of its prose, which is a mix of inflated (he does not cry, he has “lacrimal events”) and lyrical (“I am kidding and I am not kidding I remember it, which means it never happened”). There is no clear plot, though there are numerous intersecting plotlines.
It is not nonfiction, though biographical details overlap tantalizingly with Lerner’s actual life. Who should read Ben Lerner’s second novel-if it can be rightly called a novel- 10:04? It is not a book of poems, though it is filled with poetry.
0 kommentar(er)
