Here's Gilbert Sorrentino on David Antin's talk poems: “They are long, sinuous pieces, turning and twisting about a central theme or themes, and approaching that center by means of all the intellectual devices that the poet can lay his hands on. The voice that speaks these poems is incisive, articulate, witty and learned.”
From my reading of 10:04, Gilbert Sorrentino could have been describing the five chapters of this odd, strangely compelling novel by American poet Ben Lerner.
10:04 is my first exposure to Ben Lerner. His Leaving the Atocha Station is now on my TBR list. I wish I could engage in a little compare/contrast between the two Lerner novels but I can't. However, I did read where James Wood characterized narrator Adam Gordon of Atocha Station as "a convincing representative of twenty-first century American homo literatus, a creature of privilege and lassitude...certain of his own uncertainty thus more easily defined by negation than affirmation."
Ben, the first-person narrator of 10:04 surely shares much in common with Adam Gordon, thus I'll give this 33-year old New York City resident the name of Ben Gordon (hey, befitting; after all, we're talking 21st century autofiction/metafiction here).
Ben Gordon is a successful novelist and poet recently diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition. In the novel's opening pages, Ben Gordon tells us his longtime friend Alex has proposed that she get impregnated with his sperm via intrauterine insemination rather than good old intercourse since, as she tells him directly, "fucking you would be bizarre."
Ben Lerner frames 10:04 thusly, but don't look for the traditional 19th Century type of story wherein characters move and develop through an Aristotelian arc of plot; nope, not even close. 10:04 has the feel of postmodern leveling, where events, happenings and reflections could be radically rearranged without making that much difference. And for a very good reason: what really matters in 10:04 is narrative voice.
Oh, yes, fanfare with tubas and trumpets: narrative voice - a distinctive, poetic, engrossing narrative voice we gladly follow as Ben Lerner has Ben Gordon shuck and jive and occasionally flounder in his odyssey through the contemporary urban landscape. I would think many readers with birthdays hovering around 1979 (Ben Lerner's year of birth) have closely identified and bonded with Ben Gordon. And, by extension, with Ben Lerner.
Films play a huge part in 10:04. And as every film has a trailer, so the following batch of highlights can serve as this novel's trailer:
Everything will be as it is now, just a little different - This statement comes from the Hassidim and is the concluding sentence of the novel's epigraph. The narrator continually reflects on the nature of identity and how one's personal sense of self relates to the overarching reality of time and repetition. It's not for nothing Ben Gordon muses on the “critical movie of my youth” - Back to the Future. One of the photos included in the novel is a still of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) pondering his half-present hand.
Successful Author – Ben Gordon has recently published a story in The New Yorker and there's talk of a six-figure advance if he'd be willing to turn it into a novel. So intriguing; Ben Gordon will occasionally shift into third-person and allude to himself as “the writer” or “the poet.” Many the time while reading I had the distinct sense the narrator lives a double life: his immediate, physical presence and his persona as an accomplished author, reminding me of that famous tale of a world class writer facing a similar dilemma in Borges and I.
Art Alive and Well in the Present Tense – Ben Lerner's background as an art crtic manifests in each of the novel's five chapters. “Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they'd been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from the ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter's gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.”
I include the above extended quote to emphasize much of 10:04 can be taken as a meditation on Walter Benjamin's famous essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, with its themes of reappropriation, recontextualization and the loss of “aura” of originality.
Stunning and Scintillating - One of the most intriguing sections of 10:04 comes about when Ben Gordon travels to Marfa, Texas to view Donald Judd's art. He's been thinking about the phenomenon of how, as appreciators of literature and the arts, we coconstruct a work and his time in West Texas gives him a chance to flex his creative muscles.
Here's but a snip: "All those windows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, the differently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain a blurry image of the landscape within them - all combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work had never had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York."
Potpourri - The narrator shares a variety of other experiences/happenings, including feeling a kinship with Walt Whitman, his brushing with a young beauty reminding him of a Modigliani, collaborating with a lad on a dinosaur project, elaborating of his ongoing medical issues. However, since the major strength of the novel is Ben Lerner's poetic voice, I'll let the author have the last words via these direct 10:04 quotes:
“I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is."
"That part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn't obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.”
“Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.”
American author Ben Lerner, born 1979
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