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3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
Simultaneously a self-centered and a self-loathing novel. As much as some of the parts of this book are frustrating to read, its moments of brilliance and its rich thematic depth keep me from being able to say I didn’t really like it.
I'm going to add this book to my new shelf "New Yorky" - the ones loved by the literary elite, always set in NY, always using advanced vocabulary (and usually verbose), and boring to me.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
There is a lot that I liked about this book.
The fact that it is very contemporary and concerned with today’s issues (climate change, individualism, anxiety).
The fact that the purpose of the book is to tell the story about how the writer came about writing this novel. Auto-fiction <3
The fact that a lot of the action takes place in NYC so I could picture places in my head.
How well social anxiety was depicted.
However, I have to admit that this guy has first world problems only. As a western white successful artist he is clearly not the worst of (which I can relate to).
The fact that it is very contemporary and concerned with today’s issues (climate change, individualism, anxiety).
The fact that the purpose of the book is to tell the story about how the writer came about writing this novel. Auto-fiction <3
The fact that a lot of the action takes place in NYC so I could picture places in my head.
How well social anxiety was depicted.
However, I have to admit that this guy has first world problems only. As a western white successful artist he is clearly not the worst of (which I can relate to).
Love everything about Lerner's writing, but feel short-changed by the book. It felt interesting, it had stuff to say, it was powerfully lyrical in places without being mawkish. It has some great lines (like the one about octopi massaged to death). Yet it lefts with a whimper.
This is a very New York book, a very Jewish book, a very meta book, and a very literary book. There is no real plot, except that life and friends matter and being a mensch matters, even though it also makes you a neurotic mess if you are doing it right. That works for me, but I understand why some people would not value the read.
In the end this book is about love, and art, intimacy and detachment, taking chances, and the ways in which transient moments of light and darkness (actual and metaphorical) change the world that is New York. I really loved the read for the most part. Every once in a while it got too pretentious even for me, but mostly it was a thing of beauty.
In the end this book is about love, and art, intimacy and detachment, taking chances, and the ways in which transient moments of light and darkness (actual and metaphorical) change the world that is New York. I really loved the read for the most part. Every once in a while it got too pretentious even for me, but mostly it was a thing of beauty.
Ben Lerner is very addicting to me, one of the most fun writers to read even though he induces a lot of eye-rolling. I’ve yet to find something by him that doesn’t compel me to read it constantly and I’m basically just down to essays and poems at this point. It seems like a cheap comparison (I guess comparisons always are) but the first writer I think of is David Foster Wallace, though DFW seemed to be striving for higher ground morally/spiritually/aesthetically and Lerner is less prone to stretches of boring the reader (sorry DFW).
I think his outstanding characteristic as a novelist is making the reader feel like they are “in” on something smart that’s happening in the text, both through the simultaneous winking and cringing at the nature(s) of medium(s) he operates in, and by employing dorky stimulant-propelled hypomanic hyper-selfconscious Wikipedia-binging (self-insert) narrator aesthetes. He is also hilarious. (Can you guess what reminded me of DFW?) Okay, maybe this only works if you’re like that yourself, not sure, need more data. These could just be books for people who are secretly (or not so secretly) convinced that they are, despite their best efforts, incapable of fully integrating into the more emotional or communal or base parts of the human experience. Anywayssss
For me, the biggest appeal of Ben Lerner is that he’s really a poet at heart, not a novelist. He inspires me to write poetry even when he’s writing prose. I want to take his poetry class. He never exactly says it, but I get the feeling that he mainly writes novels for the money (lol) and would rather just write a book of poems every year or two. His poetry is great, so beautiful at its best, and he is extremely thoughtful about the medium. It feels like he was like, okay I might as well see if I can transfer my poetic talents into this other medium. Which he does! His prose is perceptive and playful and hyperextends itself with unexpected metaphors and similes. He experiments a lot with the boundaries between fact and fiction, presents multiple versions of the same narration, jumps around chronologically in interesting ways, shifting narration styles, etc.
It’s fair to wonder whether his novels risk being too “in” on their own joke, to the point of preempting really serious emotionality. You can’t have your cake and eat it too: all the sad and difficult moments, of which there are plenty, are filtered through his self-aware intellectual lens. It dulls the impact of scenarios which, written by certain other writers, could easily produce truly “lacrimal events.” But it cuts both ways, because the fun witty stuff probably wouldn’t sell if it was making regular detours into Serious Emotional Moments When The Irony Falls Away.
One complaint that I might have already mentioned in my review for the Topeka School — I can’t pin down exactly what the problem is, but all three novels by him suffer from a borderline sloppy incorporation of symbols/motifs. I don’t mean that they don’t connect well or integrate thematically, but rather that it’s always extremely obvious from the first mention that (eg) octopuses or aortas or whatever are going to recur in different contexts throughout the novel. Like the Chekhov’s gun rule is taken way too literally. 10:04 was an improvement over Topkea (and I think Atocha) on this, but it still pops up. Just seems uncharacteristic because I wouldn’t describe him as a sloppy writer in any other way
Anyways no thesis statement here. I pasted a few quotes I liked (no page number bc ePub but they are in order)
“Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.”
“I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.”
“Shaving is a way to start the / workday by ritually / not cutting your throat / when you’ve the chance”
I think his outstanding characteristic as a novelist is making the reader feel like they are “in” on something smart that’s happening in the text, both through the simultaneous winking and cringing at the nature(s) of medium(s) he operates in, and by employing dorky stimulant-propelled hypomanic hyper-selfconscious Wikipedia-binging (self-insert) narrator aesthetes. He is also hilarious. (Can you guess what reminded me of DFW?) Okay, maybe this only works if you’re like that yourself, not sure, need more data. These could just be books for people who are secretly (or not so secretly) convinced that they are, despite their best efforts, incapable of fully integrating into the more emotional or communal or base parts of the human experience. Anywayssss
For me, the biggest appeal of Ben Lerner is that he’s really a poet at heart, not a novelist. He inspires me to write poetry even when he’s writing prose. I want to take his poetry class. He never exactly says it, but I get the feeling that he mainly writes novels for the money (lol) and would rather just write a book of poems every year or two. His poetry is great, so beautiful at its best, and he is extremely thoughtful about the medium. It feels like he was like, okay I might as well see if I can transfer my poetic talents into this other medium. Which he does! His prose is perceptive and playful and hyperextends itself with unexpected metaphors and similes. He experiments a lot with the boundaries between fact and fiction, presents multiple versions of the same narration, jumps around chronologically in interesting ways, shifting narration styles, etc.
It’s fair to wonder whether his novels risk being too “in” on their own joke, to the point of preempting really serious emotionality. You can’t have your cake and eat it too: all the sad and difficult moments, of which there are plenty, are filtered through his self-aware intellectual lens. It dulls the impact of scenarios which, written by certain other writers, could easily produce truly “lacrimal events.” But it cuts both ways, because the fun witty stuff probably wouldn’t sell if it was making regular detours into Serious Emotional Moments When The Irony Falls Away.
One complaint that I might have already mentioned in my review for the Topeka School — I can’t pin down exactly what the problem is, but all three novels by him suffer from a borderline sloppy incorporation of symbols/motifs. I don’t mean that they don’t connect well or integrate thematically, but rather that it’s always extremely obvious from the first mention that (eg) octopuses or aortas or whatever are going to recur in different contexts throughout the novel. Like the Chekhov’s gun rule is taken way too literally. 10:04 was an improvement over Topkea (and I think Atocha) on this, but it still pops up. Just seems uncharacteristic because I wouldn’t describe him as a sloppy writer in any other way
Anyways no thesis statement here. I pasted a few quotes I liked (no page number bc ePub but they are in order)
“Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity—whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body.”
“I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.”
“Shaving is a way to start the / workday by ritually / not cutting your throat / when you’ve the chance”
Sometimes reading another perspective about something I also experienced can feel like an eye opener and other times, it just seems like the same old conversation. This felt like more of the latter to. I do like a lot of the depictions of live in Brooklyn and NYC from 2010-2012, but I think I didn't really bond with the author enough to fully enjoy the book.