For the line between reality and fiction is never clear in this novel. It’s a novel about the making of a novel which may or may not be the one we are already reading.ġ0:04 inhabits what Ben refers to as ‘the very edge of fiction’. After briefly retreating into the past, Ben slingshots us into the future, and sets up the premise for Lerner’s novel: this is a metafiction.

This first section is more than just an account of how he came to embark on writing the novel it also forms the opening scene of that future work. I managed to draft an earnest if indefinite proposal and soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses and we were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene.īen has won an advance to start writing his first novel. A few paragraphs later, Ben explains the cause for celebration, by going back even further in time:Ī few months before, the agent had emailed me that she believed I could get a ‘strong six-figure’ advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in the New Yorker all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel. The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.īen and his agent are walking along New York City’s High Line, before we are transported back a few hours earlier, when the pair are celebrating in Chelsea. The title gives us little clue about the content of Lerner’s novel (though the main character, Ben, describes Back to the Future as an ‘iconic film of my youth’).īut it does give us a sense of the games afoot in this slippery, clever and multi-layered novel. This new novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station presents a worldly and liberating take on modern fiction-writing.īen Lerner’s 10:04 takes its title from Back to the Future, from the moment when lightning strikes a clock tower and sends Marty McFly, a captive in 1955, home to 1985.

Tags: American fiction/ Ben Lerner/ John Barth/ Karl Ove Knausgaard/ Teju Cole/ Walt Whitman/ WG Sebald

10 by Ben Lerner