10:04 by Ben Lerner

Normally I would not write about a book such as 10:04 (Ben Lerner, 2014, Faber and Faber), except in this case the book is such a good example of much that I think is wrong with so many novels today, seeming more like a college bull session that anything else. It is full of the fear of growing up and being responsible and takes refuge in the idea that maybe nothing is real anyway.  And it's a book about writing a book, where the author writes about himself in the third person and at various times says, in response to a question, "she's not in this story," the book consisting of stories within stories, with characters seemingly arbitrarily shifting in and out.

The fear of having children is especially strong in 10:04, with Lerner at one point donating his semen for a friend (in a scene, like much of the book, derivative of Philip Roth) and at another trying to guide a child through a museum: "I was at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one's bladder."  This fear of having children is linked to a fear of the future without guidelines or guarantees and a fear of death, as the author faces the possibility of an aortic dissection and anxiety about having his wisdom teeth removed:  "nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past."

These elements of immaturity --"I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet" -- and fear of the future would be more acceptable if Lerner's writing style were not so irritating.  Much of the prose is purposely hallucinatory and there is a show-off tendency to drop somewhat irrelevant words into the middle of sentences, such as the "craquelure" of the wake of a boat underneath the "Aeolian cables" of the Brooklyn Bridge. It might be that this book was intended as a parodic catalogue of so many contemporary novels, but I somehow doubt it.