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jamichalski 's review for:
10:04
by Ben Lerner
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”