Ben Lerner, 10:04, Faber and Faber, 2014.
excerpts: False Spring, Specimen Days
In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called 'hilarious... cracklingly intelligent... and original in every sentence', Lerner's new novel charts an exhilarating course through the contemporary landscape of sex, friendship, memory, art and politics, and captures what is like to be alive right now.
As a self-imposed pseudo-challenge, I recently decided to read T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” every day for 30 days. Though I left the tab open in my browser for a month, I failed to complete the challenge. Still, each time I re-read it, I was awed by the way Eliot posits a character and then projects on him a haughty, highbrow diction, creating ironic distance between author and speaker. Thus the poem unfolds like a kind of magic trick: Eliot manages to use “mock poetry voice” to write one of the most moving and beautiful poems in the English language.
I suspect that Ben Lerner—who wrote three acclaimed books of poetry before his first novel, 2012’s excellent Leaving the Atocha Station—is also an admirer of Eliot. In his second novel, 10:04, Lerner has created a work of autobiographical metafiction that continually finds new ways to refer to itself as writing—“the author” is never quite the author, the narrative is always one or two steps removed. Lerner as author is a master manipulator, immersing you into the flow of a story and then pulling you back up to the surface at will. On the first page he tells us: “I am kidding and I am not kidding.”
The novel begins the way it began, in “what would become the opening scene”: Lerner and his agent have just shared an “outrageously expensive celebratory meal” on the occasion of his having secured a “strong six-figure” advance for his second novel. The proposal, we eventually learn, was for a different novel, but this is the one he ended up writing: a novel about a novelist who, while watching an art film that takes place in real time, has the idea for a short story (based on his life, but full of “transpositions”), which he then writes and publishes in the New Yorker. When his agent tells him she believes she can get him a six-figure advance if he expands the story into a novel, he commits to it in part to help fund the reproductive efforts of his best friend Alex; friends since college, they are both un-partnered and she is approaching 40, so she enlists his (potentially unwell) sperm in the creation of a kind of family.
Structurally, 10:04 is divided into five parts:
Part One establishes the characters, including the poet-novelist; Alex; a few more close friends, including Natali and Bernard, two older, established writers from Providence who have asked him to be their literary executor, and Alena, his loose love/sex interest; Roberto, a third-grader he is mentoring; and the team of medical professionals assigned to examine the novelist’s heart condition, likely a genetic condition called Marfan Syndrome. Toward the end of Part One, the novelist has the idea for the aforementioned short story; writing more fiction, he says, is “something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do,” but the story comes “quickly, almost alarmingly so.” His agent sends it to the New Yorker, and they accept it, with a requested edit. He first makes a show of refusing to compromise his artistic sensibilities, but after several friends assure him the edit improves the story, he recants and it appears in the magazine.
Part Two is, in its entirety, that story: “The Golden Vanity,” which appeared in the June 18, 2012, issue of the New Yorker.
Part Three further establishes the supposed contradictions of the narrator: he’s got that advance and a job at Columbia; he hobnobs with and is clearly capable of charming “distinguished authors,” such as Natali and Bernard, who seem like clear analogs of C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander. (And is the South African author he shares the stage with J.M. Coetzee? Lerner embeds the full text of a lecture he delivered on his origin as a writer, which he attributes to his experience of the 1986 Challenger disaster; this long quotation feels like a formal nod to Elizabeth Costello.) Still, he experiences crippling self-doubt and insecurity in the face of seemingly simple tasks, such as masturbating into a cup at the hospital, or taking Roberto to the natural history museum. He becomes increasingly convinced that he will fail at his assigned task(s): “My actual novel everyone would thrash….I was confident my book wouldn’t sell.”
Part Four follows the author’s residency in Marfa, Texas, a five-week stint his agent urges him to spend working on the novel, but which he mostly spends transitioning into a nocturnal animal, reading Whitman’s Specimen Days, and writing a not-very-interesting long poem, excerpts of which are also embedded in the novel. This section is like a condensed Leaving the Atocha Station: a fellowship narrative inevitably spliced with a party narrative. (I love good party writing and Lerner does this as well as anybody.) After avoiding all human contact for two weeks, he runs into friends of friends in town and is persuaded to join them for a private art viewing, dinner, and a local gathering. Here the author drinks too much and befriends a young intern who accidentally overdoses on ketamine, believing it to be cocaine. He sits with the kid through his k-hole, reassuring him with lines from Whitman (“I am with you, and know how it is”), until he falls asleep, then wanders back home. After going to see the Marfa Lights with another, seemingly equally reticent resident, upon whom he has projected the spirit of Robert Creeley, the novelist decides not to write the novel he proposed, but this one: “the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them.”
Part Five, the final section, follows the author back to NY. He accompanies Alex on a visit to her parents’ place in New Paltz, where her mother is dying of cancer; in their basement, the two plod through platonic copulation to assist the risky and costly intrauterine inseminations. Later, back at Columbia, he meets with a graduate student who appears to be having a psychotic break, but his delusions are frighteningly plausible:
“Can you look at me and say you think this,” and here he swept the air with his arm in a way that made “this” indicate something very large, “is going to continue? You deny there’s poison coming at us from a million points? Do you want to tell me these storms aren’t man-made, even if they’re now out of the government’s control? You don’t think the FBI is fucking with our phones? The language is becoming marks, drawings of words, not words—you should know that as well as anybody. Or are you on drugs? Are you letting them regulate you?”
The novelist takes steps to address the situation, emailing colleagues and the department chair for advice; he emails the student to say he is concerned and wants to help. But:
I didn’t say that our society could not, in its present form, go on, or that I believed the storms were in part man-made, or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI fucks with citizens’ phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true. And that my mood was regulated by drugs. And that sometimes the language was a jumble of marks.
This is not the first or only time that the novelist responds calmly to rational panic. In the next episode, he is delivering copies to Roberto of a self-published, no-expenses-spared children’s book that the two of them authored together. However, Roberto is uninterested, more concerned about the (second) coming “superstorm” and potential for “water wars.” “Almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030,” the author admits to us/himself, but he assures Roberto there is no reason to worry. If panic is rational, what does that say of the author’s own “irrational” panic—the fears that he might “dissect,” his aorta failing, at any moment, that he is inept to be a father, and that Alex believes him unqualified anyway, merely a donor?
In the final scenes, “Ben” and Alex are forced to walk over seven miles from a sonogram appointment back to Brooklyn in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The subways are shut down, no cab will stop, the buses are full, and wide swaths of the city are in darkness. Given the timing of publication, this must have been written very shortly after the actual storm, in October 2012. So like Tao Lin with last year’s brilliant Taipei and Karl Ove Knausgaard with the multi-volume My Struggle, he’s writing this autobiographical metafiction in what feels like near-real-time. There are clear similarities between Lin’s recent fiction and Lerner’s—though, interestingly, Lerner’s novels are all about the business of writing, whereas Taipei revolves around a writer identical to Lin who never appears to write or think much about writing at all, outside of 10,000-word emails to his parents.
I haven’t read My Struggle, but Ben Lerner has—he reviewed Vol. 3 in the London Review of Books:
Most critics attempt to demonstrate a novelist’s perceptiveness by providing examples of his eye for the significant detail. But part of what makes Knausgaard’s writing unusual is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything).
10:04 is not so maximalist, and its 240 pages are restrictive in their focus. For example, physical descriptions are minimal. We know the narrator finds Alex attractive but not much about her appearance otherwise—because who cares? You know what people look like. Thus the author has decided to ignore his preconceptions about what kinds of novels sell:
“Just remember this is your opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You have to decide who you want your audience to be, who you think that is,” my agent said, and what I heard was: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table.”
Visual description, of course, brings fiction a little closer to the movies, and adaptability of this sort is part of what makes popular fiction popular. A novel like 10:04 that relies so heavily on verbal self-reference could not be translated faithfully into film.
Of Vol. 3, Lerner wrote, “If your attention as a writer is so egalitarian that your memoir describes a bowl of cornflakes and, say, your brother’s face with the same level of detail, how do we determine a hierarchy of value?” His point is that the carpet-bombing attention is what makes Knausgaard’s work so “amazing,” but this isn’t his own approach as a writer, and what takes the lion’s share of attention in Lerner’s fiction is the author/narrator’s own mental processes—the outside world is only interesting insofar as it provides input for this internal drama, which is preferably enhanced by mood-altering substances or at least mood-altering circumstances. Chief among these processes is his tendency to overthink and overfeel himself into a state of sweaty, dissociative obsession.
The narrator’s coping mechanism for these spells in life seems to translate directly into Lerner’s writing process. In the embedded short story, the author’s doctor (transposed to a therapist, in this context?) provides a strategy for dealing with his spirals of doubt:
He remembered Dr. Roberts’s idea. Roberts had said that when the author found himself in one of these “false predicaments,” and he began to draw shorter and shorter breaths, he should just describe whatever little crisis he’d manufactured, what he was feeling, to whomever he was meeting in the same “winning and humorous way” he recounted it after the fact to Roberts.
The narrator does this performance all the time for other characters. But the prose is at its funniest and most deft when Lerner is doing it not for another character, but for us, the readers of this book, as in the museum episode with Roberto:
We stopped before a display explaining the development of the vertebrate jaw and, as I instructed Roberto to sketch the remains of a pterosaur in his notebook, I felt despair spread through me like contrast dye. The eight-year-old is having a fine time learning about evolution while his guide is freaking out because of all the strangers and stimulation; I was the nervous kid far from home longing for my parents, not Roberto; I was the one who kept clinging to his hand; I’d become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.
Another favorite passage: the scene in Part One where Ben and Alex prepare for the first of the two storms, which turns out to be a false alarm, and we see Ben’s mostly secret affection for Alex (how he strokes her hair when he thinks she’s asleep), his knack for describing the charge in the air as the city braces for disaster, the inevitable disappointment (and dissipation of the aura) when that disaster doesn’t arrive. As they wander the Union Square Whole Foods looking for staples, everyday objects are imbued with an “unspecifiable radiance”:
Everything will be as it is now, just a little different—nothing in me or the store had changed, except maybe my aorta, but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly—the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.
10:04 is repetitive—recursive—by design, but people who are interested in repetition tend (guess what?) to overdo it, and while at first I found it clever when a simile or analogy would show up in both the novel proper and in one of the embedded stories or poems, I eventually grew tired of seeing the same metaphors and turns of phrase (literally verbatim) over and over, almost as though the book were creating its own system of clichés. When something unusual happens, it’s always for “whatever complex of reasons”; the warmth, whether in New York or Texas, is always unseasonable. (You can’t write a work of near-real-time autobiographical metafiction, or NRTAMF, without the undercurrent of global warming.)
Lerner is capable of beautifully reinforcing a theme, as when the intern in Marfa describes his drug-induced paranoid delusion, where everything that occurs to him comes true:
“And I knew before I thought it that I was going to think: It’s like I’m dead, like I’m a ghost looking at my corpse, and I was trying not to think that because I would die if I did. But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape.”
What an apt metaphor for this novel! The author knows his own somewhat cynical reasons for writing the book; he knows his doubts that it will succeed; they form the shape of the book, so why not put them in the book, their perfect container?
What can be frustrating, though, is Lerner’s almost pathological need to poke holes in that container, to remind you a little too often of what he’s doing. Too, as in Leaving the Atocha Station, he frequently calls his own brilliance (as validated by mentors, committees, and contest judges aplenty) into question, but this show of insecurity is like a pretty girl wondering out loud if she looks OK; he’s only reminding us of his brilliance. They all think I’m a genius, but really I’m a fraud is a little less convincing as a trope in the second novel.
10:04, like Reagan’s (Peggy Noonan–penned) speech after the Challenger explosion, ends with a quote—two quotes, in fact, or rather three, depending on where you stop counting. The narrator’s final sentence quotes Whitman, and then a kind of post-script epigraph quotes Reagan quoting Back to the Future, one of the central motifs in the novel. His tendencies to overreach and self-sabotage aside, what makes Lerner one of the most compelling young writers working in both fiction and poetry is that he’s fascinated by, and engaging convincingly with, fascinating things—time, possibility, the future (and how the present is already the future), levels of reality and the points where they cross over. - Elisa Gabbert
In the new issue of Tin House, the literary quarterly, there’s a terrific conversation — conducted on Google Chat — between Annie Nugent Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and the novelist Benjamin Baker Nugent, her brother.
At one point, Ms. Baker says, nearly out the blue, “I’m so scared of contemporary fiction that isn’t Ben Lerner.” Her brother asks why, and her reply commences this way: “I’m scared of contemporary fiction because it often seems to me like the author is trying to write something that could be easily adapted into a movie.” Fie on intense plot, she says. She wants intense language and intellection.
These snippets of sibling dialogue leapt out at me because I’d just finished reading Mr. Lerner’s new novel, “10:04,” and had experienced similar thoughts.
Mr. Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists at present for several reasons, one being that he’s akin to a young Brooklynite version of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. That is, in his books, little happens, yet everything happens. Small moments come steeped in vertiginous magic.
Mr. Lerner’s new novel, his second, has a futuristic title and an unsettling cover, an aerial photograph of Manhattan at night that you have to look at twice to absorb. For one thing, the image has been reversed, so the West Village is about where the Lower East Side should be.
For another, the lower-middle portions of the city’s thorax are dark. This is a photograph, you realize, from October 2012, when Hurricane Sandy knocked out power to portions of Manhattan’s grid. It’s an image that evokes this book’s destabilized atmosphere, what Mr. Lerner’s protagonist describes at one point as his “residency late in the empire of drones.”
(Apocalyptic photographs of the Northeast’s recent weather events are making the rounds on covers this fall. Richard Ford’s forthcoming book, “Let Me Be Frank With You,” features an eerie image of a Jersey Shore roller coaster submerged in the Atlantic.)
Mr. Lerner’s title, “10:04,” is a reference to both Christian Marclay’s video art installation “The Clock” and to his unnamed narrator’s favorite movie, “Back to the Future.” In the film, 10:04 p.m. is when lightning strikes the courthouse tower, allowing Michael J. Fox’s character to return to 1985.
The reference to “Back to the Future” is resonant because Mr. Lerner plays so adeptly with temporality. In “10:04,” he’s written a striking and important novel of New York City, partly because he’s so cognizant of both past and present. He’s a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman, but also with writers up through Teju Cole, whose protagonists are wide-awake flâneurs.
“10:04” gives us intense moments on the High Line and in Prospect Park, and there are urban sublimes glimpsed while the narrator is jacked up on a dentist’s painkillers. When he observes Manhattan from Brooklyn, he sees not only “the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the F.D.R. and the present absence of the towers” but imagines “bundled debt” and “trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water.” We come to relish seeing the world through this man’s eyes.
Mr. Lerner’s novel picks up more or less where his last one, “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), left off. Which is to say that this novel is also vaguely autobiographical and metafictional; it’s about a 33-year-old man who is writing a second novel.
The author, who is also a poet, has his narrator describe his method in “10:04” as one that he hopes will resemble poetry. “Part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain,” he says, “how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself.”
This story begins during Hurricane Irene and ends during Hurricane Sandy, a night in the city when, the narrator recalls, there is “a strange energy crackling among us: part parade, part flight, part protest.”
Between these events, and underneath the high winds, the emotional core of “10:04” details the relationship between the narrator and Alex, a close friend from college. She hopes to have a baby, with his sperm.
A scene in which the protagonist masturbates into an in vitro fertilization vial at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is a small comic masterpiece of wayward post-“Portnoy’s Complaint” onanism. An awkward sex scene between the two — they can’t stop laughing — is nearly as winning.
Does he want to be a father, the narrator wonders, or merely a donor? He worries that he is “no more a functioning adult than Pluto was a planet.” What’s more, he has health issues that go beyond his possibly defective sperm. He has a “potentially aneurysmal dilation of my aortic root” that may kill him, if a possible brain tumor does not end him first.
Mr. Lerner artfully blends other bite-size narratives into “10:04,” including a spell at a writing colony in Marfa, Tex., and a mordant consideration of whether Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan are responsible for making the narrator a poet. He is a constantly vivid observer of the world. About morning ablutions, he writes in a bit of this novel that arrives as verse:
“Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.”
The narrator is a member of the Park Slope Food Coop, and there are extended and jaggedly sharp meditations on food and politics. One of these begins by noting “a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: Instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were — for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault — compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside.”
In a novel that is so excellent on grief of many stripes, this observation stands out: “If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for the frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight — a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.”
At one point in “10:04,” the narrator is having dinner with his agent. They consume baby octopuses “massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease.” (I would read a book of food writing from Mr. Lerner.)
He tells her he hopes his novel will be, on some level, “a long list of things that quicken the heart.” At this he has succeeded perfectly. -
The narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam Gordon, a twentysomething American on a fellowship in Madrid in 2004, worries that as a poet he may be a fraud, and that his experiences of art are inauthentic or insufficiently profound, something that could also be said of his two love affairs with Spanish women. Another poet we see in the novel is plainly bad, his work “an Esperanto of clichés: waves, heart, pain, moon, breasts, beach, emptiness, etc.; the delivery was so cloying the thought crossed my mind that his apparent earnestness might be parody. But then he read his second poem, ‘Distance’: mountains, sky, heart, pain, stars, breasts, river, emptiness, etc.” Much of the novel’s humor springs from Adam’s hostility to poetry, his general aesthetic ambivalence, and his uneasiness at being an emissary from “the United States of Bush.” It should be mentioned too that he spends a long stretch of the book taking more than the recommended dosage of his meds and high on hash.
The story of Adam’s overmedicated if highly intellectualized quarter-life crisis was loosed on American fiction at a time when writing’s reality quotient was the going debate, and it was in many ways a perfect specimen for those arguing (like David Shields in Reality Hunger) against conspicuous fictionality and unblurred lines. (Other specimens include Teju Cole’s Open City, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, and the novels of Tao Lin.) Adam and Lerner share a résumé, and the book proceeds in a manner not unlike a diary, with a progress rather than a plot. Much of it is essayistic, a container for Lerner’s ideas about art and poetry (and bits of his poems), including thoughts he gives Adam from an essay of his own about Ashbery, whose “poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience.” Time is delineated in terms of “phases” of Adam’s “project”: Nominally the project is the research-based poem about the Spanish Civil War he’s been awarded the fellowship to write, but really it’s his life, and so it’s also the novel itself. The effect is the illusion of the boundary between life and art collapsing. Yet Leaving the Atocha Station didn’t leave you wondering whether what happened to Adam happened to Lerner. Who was Lerner in 2011 but some precocious poet with eyebrows that, like Adam’s, look sort of like Jack Nicholson’s?
But now he’s a successful young novelist, and the fauna of the literary ecosystem, not to say book reviewers, love nothing better than the schadenfreude that attends the spectacle of a sophomore slump. Perhaps that’s especially the case when the novelist has received a swell book deal, and has moved, in the manner of a sellout, to a corporate publisher. This is one scenario dramatized in Lerner’s new novel, 10:04. Its narrator has in common with Lerner a first name, residence in Brooklyn, a teaching job at Brooklyn College. The Ben of 10:04 has written a novel that, though never named, sounds like Leaving the Atocha Station. When Ben goes on dates, women seem to be checking to see if they’re sitting across from Adam Gordon. “You sound like your novel,” somebody says. Having a slight panic attack, Ben worries that he’s “become the unreliable narrator of my first novel.” Ben also purports to be the author of 10:04, the book he’s now narrating, for which he’s earned $270,000 after taxes and the agent’s fee. Will it have an accessible, schematic plot and plenty of character development? Or will he “write a novel that dissolves into a poem about how the small-scale transformations of the erotic must be harnessed by the political,” i.e., a “novel everyone would thrash”?
How seriously should we take this novel-about-my-book-deal metafiction? Ben is the sort of person intellectually curious about the systems of commerce but not much interested in (or capable of) writing commercial fiction. He conceives of and scraps a plot involving forged letters from dead poets that he intends to sell to a university archive: the great epistolary-poetic fabrication thriller of 2014! But we know that’s not the sort of novel we’re reading. 10:04 is instead another progress, and the metafiction acts as a binding agent. The narrative stretches from the summer of 2011, marked by the threat of Tropical Storm Irene (a short time after the release of Leaving the Atocha Station), to the autumn of 2012 and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Is Ben the narrator Lerner the author? He’s fairly frank about his method, which he’s borrowed from his poetic practice: “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.”
So 10:04 is a novel of intensities, an unfolding present. Some of this present is personal. At the start, Ben is diagnosed with “an entirely asymptomatic and potentially aneurysmal dilation of my aortic root” that could turn the artery into “a whipping hose spraying blood into my blood.” He’s also trying to impregnate his best friend Alex by artificial insemination (“fucking you would be bizarre,” she tells him). And he’s casually dating a conceptual painter named Alena with a taste for autoerotic asphyxiation. Other strands of the novel put Ben into contact with aspects of the city. He tutors an eight-year-old boy named Roberto, a well-drawn character but also a surrogate-son figure and an emissary from the immigrant class—Ben is constantly aware of being served by people who speak Spanish. Politics enters in the form of an Occupy protester who uses Ben’s shower and eats a meal he cooks, and an Adderall-addled student fixated on environmental apocalypse. Ben sits at the bed of a hospitalized mentor, who represents a connection with a vanishing avant-garde. He publishes a story in the New Yorker, fretting over whether he’ll let its editors “standardize” his work. After he signs his book deal, there’s an interlude in Marfa, Texas, where he sees the specter of Robert Creeley. At a party just before he sees the ghost, he snorts what he thinks is cocaine:
I saw myself from the outside, in the third person, in a separate window, laughing in slow motion—but then, having done such a stimulant, why was I outside myself; why was time slowing? Before I knew it, I was trying hard to hold on to that question, felt it was the last link between me and my body, but soon the question didn’t belong to me, was just another thing there in the courtyard from which my consciousness was turning away. Then I was a relation between the heaters, the sky, and the blue gleam of the pool, and then I was gone, wasn’t anything at all, the darkest sky in North America. The last vestige of my personality was my terror at my personality’s dissolution, so I clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope ladder back into my body. Once there, I told my arm to move the cigarette to my lips, watched it do so, but had no sense of the arm or lips as mine, had no proprioception. . . . Only after the young woman in the bathing suit said, “K—ketamine—mainly, I thought you knew,” did I hear myself ask, “What the fuck was that?”
“Proprioception” is the sort of hyper-specific Latinate diction Lerner takes great pleasure in—Ben’s frequent visits to the hospital afford plenty of opportunities for its deployment—but his tone never veers too far away from “What the fuck?” The way he writes about drug experience isn’t much different from the way he writes about art—he’s after all most interested in experiences of art, profound or otherwise—and 10:04 contains many discussions of artworks, including Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, The Third Man, Back to the Future, the poetry of William Bronk, Christian Marclay’s The Clock, Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, the rigorously inoffensive pictures on the walls of doctors’ offices, and Alena’s paintings. Alena has also assembled a collection of artworks in the possession of an insurance company, so damaged that they no longer count as artworks on the market—“zero-value” art. Ben’s discussion of her “Institute for Totaled Art” is fictionalized from Lerner’s discussion of Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute in an essay he wrote for Harper’s, and Lerner’s use of the novel as a receptacle for his ideas is also a way of showing us, with gentle pats of semi-ironic didacticism, how to read (and how he wrote) 10:04. The title comes from the moment in Back to the Future (Ben’s favorite movie) when lightning strikes the courthouse clock tower, allowing Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly to zoom back to the ’80s in his tricked-out DeLorean. That scene is part of Marclay’s collage of time shots in The Clock, about which Ben says: “It was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration than to combine the various scenes into a coherent and compelling fiction, in part due to Marclay’s use of repetition.”
Of course, he might as well be talking about 10:04. The novel as thought receptacle isn’t a mode without risks: There he goes again, banging on about his trip to the Met. But it’s the integration of the criticism and the fiction—of the thinking and the living—that’s part of the unique achievement of 10:04. Lerner invites a comparison to the work of J. M. Coetzee, another novelist with a tendency to blur himself and his protagonists and to use the novel as a Trojan horse for his ideas. Twice in 10:04 we encounter a “distinguished South African writer” with a salt-and-pepper beard (I doubt it’s Breyten Breytenbach), the second time on a panel at Columbia after Ben delivers a speech on how the Challenger disaster inspired him to become a poet (another instance of Lerner using collage and appropriation and dispensing clues about how to read his novels; Ben wouldn’t have become a poet, it turns out, without the example of Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan). The panelists issue platitudinous imperatives about writing: “Think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form.” And at dinner afterward the suspiciously Coetzee-like titan is mocked by Ben for his “logorrhea”: “It was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal. . . . [The] evening was doomed.” What a disgrace!
Thirtysomethings in Brooklyn tend to go at things with a colder realism. Alex’s pragmatic enlistment of Ben in her reproductive plans complicates their friendship and lends the book a minor undercurrent of dramatic tension: One night he (tenderly) gropes her while she’s sleeping (albeit with plausible deniability); another night he makes a drunken pass at her. Alena meanwhile has a “capacity to establish insuperable distances no matter our physical proximity.” These are the two models of male-female relations in 10:04: old friends driven to have a child together by necessity, and casual text-message-driven copulating fueled by a vague intellectual connection. Walking away from the fertility clinic, Ben imagines a conversation he might have with his future daughter:
“So your dad watched a video of young women whose families hailed from the world’s most populous continent get sodomized for money and emptied his sperm into a cup he paid a bunch of people to wash and shoot into your mom through a tube.”
“Wasn’t the tube cold?” [. . .]
“You’d have to ask her.” [. . .]
“How are you going to pay for all this?” she asked me.
“On the strength of my New Yorker story.” [. . .]
“Is that why you’ve exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership?”
“Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.”
“Are you projecting your artistic ambition onto me?”
“So what if I am?”
The conversation, which conveys 10:04’s persistent and satisfying humor, comes halfway through Ben’s march from irony to sincerity. By the novel’s end, he’s on the bridge, looking over the whole city, quoting Whitman, the journey complete and the boast fulfilled. This is a beautiful and original novel. Lerner’s book is marked by many reminders of death and dying: Ben’s faulty aorta, the ecological turmoil suggested by two superstorms. But 10:04’s prime theme is regeneration, biological and artistic, and it signals a new direction in American fiction, perhaps a fertile one. - Christian Lorentzen“Why didn’t Mom just adopt?”
I admired Ben Lerner's last novel a lot; in fact, I ended my review of Leaving the Atocha Station by saying that "reading it was unlike any other novel-reading experience I've had for a long time." I could say the very same thing about Lerner's brilliant new novel, 10:04, which leads me to wonder: Just how many singular reading experiences can one novelist serve up? And if every one of Lerner's novels is singular, doesn't that make them, in a way, repetitive?
Those are the kind of flip philosophical ruminations that Lerner's writing encourages. He's self-conscious, funny and smart: His riffs on everything from wisdom teeth extraction to the space shuttle Challenger disaster flash by your eyes with the urban fluidity of silverfish. Granted, as I did while reading Leaving the Atocha Station, I got a little exasperated with Lerner. He indulges a smarty-pants tic of using hyperinflated language to describe the mundane, like when his anonymous narrator in 10:04 announces that he's crying by telling us he's having "a mild lacrimal event." Too much of that Mr. Spock dialect can be a turnoff — fortunately, though, Lerner reins himself in as the novel progresses. 10:04 is a mind-blowing book; to use Lerner's own description, it's a book that's written "on the very edge of fiction."
Now, if only I didn't have to try to explain what the book is about, because, just like its title, the plot of 10:04 is way out of the box. Nevertheless, here goes: Our unnamed narrator, who intersects with Lerner himself, has gotten a huge advance to write his second novel on the strength of a story he's published in The New Yorker. When 10:04 opens, our narrator and his agent are celebrating at an expensive restaurant in Manhattan. There, they ingest baby octopuses that have been literally massaged to death by the chef. Our narrator tells his agent that he plans to expand his story into a novel by "project[ing] myself into several futures simultaneously ... [by working] my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city. ..."
That, of course, is also an overview of 10:04 itself, the hyper-aware novel Lerner writes for us. Bookended by two historic hurricanes that threatened New York City (Irene and Sandy), 10:04 projects our narrator into several possible plotlines. For instance, he receives a diagnosis of a serious aortic heart valve problem as he also consents to be the sperm donor for a close friend who yearns to have a baby while he also leaves town for a writers' retreat in Texas. Lerner's dazzling writing connects and collapses all these storylines into one.
Here, for instance, is a snippet where our narrator describes New York City girding for Hurricane Irene. Note how octopuses and aortas swirl into the hurricane update in this passage: "From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and ... inflecting traffic patterns ... I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swelled. There were myriad apps to track it ... the same technology they'd utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries."
Here’s the thing: it’s hard to describe a Ben Lerner novel to someone without it sounding kind of terrible. After reading his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, I found myself saying to people: “Well, it’s about a young American poet abroad in Madrid, trying to figure things out… no wait, come back, I swear it’s really good.” With the new novel, I find myself saying “It’s about a youngish American poet who was surprised by his first novel’s success, trying to write a second novel and figure things out… yes, that sounds like Lerner’s life… no wait, come back, I insist this time!”
This must be some kind of cosmic joke, because his novels are so, so good. I swear.
In fact, Lerner’s new novel 10:04 may be the best contemporary work of meta-fiction I’ve ever read. It concerns, yes, a Lerner-like protagonist who receives a big advance for a second novel, the novel we soon understand to be, in both fiction and reality, the book we are holding. He is also approached by his best friend, Alex, who’d like to get pregnant using his sperm. He has recently discovered he has a heart condition that could end his life without warning. A hurricane has come, and a hurricane is coming. His agent is feeding him baby octopus corpses.
All this, we are meant to understand, is sort of fiction, and sort of not, and part of what’s so brilliant about this novel is the way Lerner casually employs technical innovations to underscore that idea. This novel cannibalizes poetry, children’s books, memoir, movies, photographs, fine art and short fiction, and throws it all together to create meaning — no wonder it feels like life. (This is life, mind you, as related by a poet, each sentence a delight.) The second chapter, for instance, is presented as the narrator’s story in The New Yorker, but of course, it is actually Lerner’s — reprinted wholesale from a June 2012 issue. This is the kind of thing that, in the hands of a lesser writer, could feel cheap or gimmicky, but in Lerner’s, it feels like a discovery. Was this originally an excerpt from a slightly different book? Was this, in fact, the plan all along? Has Lerner left us a trail of literary breadcrumbs towards meaning? He has, I think, even if we can’t always follow.
But though this is indeed a formally meta-fictional novel, there’s something even more subtle going on here, something you could call meta-experiential. This novel, which is so much about literary creation and reflection, also feels like the way the mind works: in patterns, in dialogue, in mirrors. Lerner returns again and again to the idea of the world “rearranging itself” around him to allow for new information, new perspectives. We return again and again to certain moments, viewing them through various veils of fiction, of fraudulence. Lerner’s narrator meditates on time flux or lack thereof (the title refers both to Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Back to the Future). The book swirls in on itself, like our minds do. It gets stuck on things. It gets unstuck. It worries. You may not think you need a book to worry for you, but it’s a surprisingly pleasant feeling.
At the end of the novel, Lerner’s narrator and Alex look across a disaster-deadened New York:
We saw a bright glow to the east among the dark towers of the Financial District, like the eye-shine of some animal. Later we would learn it was Goldman Sachs, see photographs in which one of the few illuminated buildings in the skyline was the investment banking firm, an image I’d use for the cover of my book — not the one I was contracted to write about fraudulence, but the one I’ve written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction.
Lerner’s novel is indeed this: a triumph teetering at the edge of fiction. It’s an edge I wish more writers would press against. - Emily Temple
In the Hasidic vision of the afterlife, which Ben Lerner appropriates as epigraph to his eagerly anticipated second novel, “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.” It is one way of describing the arc of his own new book, whose narrator asks: “What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?” “10:04” is not a work for readers who crave linear plots and narrative progression.
Lerner writes rich, ruminative fiction that gnaws over one idea (time, art, ethnicity, paternity, etc.), moves on to another, and then returns to chew over the first again. With so much munching, it is no surprise that in one dramatic scene, Lerner’s 33-year-old narrator has his wisdom teeth removed. Electing to be totally anesthetized, he avoids suffering but also any memory of the episode. The narrator, called “the author,” recognizes that he is creating a gap, like the intervals between present and future, experience and expression, and Lerner and his narrator doppelganger, that haunt him throughout: “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.”
In a scene that begins the book and to which it returns much later, the author and his agent dine on expensive baby octopus to celebrate a six-figure book contract. Like Lerner himself, who, after three volumes of poetry, published a critically acclaimed novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), the author is now faced with the challenge of writing a worthy second novel. After many false starts, it will eventually emerge as “the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them.”
“10:04,” which derives its title from the time on the courthouse clock tower at the moment that lightning strikes in the movie “Back to the Future,” is a self-begetting novel, a metafiction that recounts its own genesis. Along the way, the author mulls over several possibilities before rejecting them. One is the story of an author who forges letters from famous writers in order to sell his archive to a library for an inflated price. It would have been a false account of fraud presented as fiction.
Though a summary of “10:04” might make it seem insufferably cerebral, it is in fact heady without being precious, packed with striking, often comic, incidents. They include a visit to the Institute for Totaled Art, a warehouse on Long Island containing pieces so damaged that their owners received full compensation from the insurer. Is it still art? Does it retain monetary value? Throughout the novel, the author vacillates about cooperating with his best friend Alex, a 36-year-old woman who is anxious about her biological clock and wants him to inseminate her artificially. Despite his ambivalence about fatherhood and uncertainty about what his relationship to a child conceived without sex would be, he visits a clinic’s grotesque masturbatorium to provide a semen sample. And he does channel paternal impulses in a disastrous outing to the American Museum of Natural History with a disadvantaged third-grader he volunteered to mentor.
A screening of Christian Marclay’s “The Clock,” a video art installation that is a 24-hour-long montage of movie clips illustrating successive moments in the day, leaves the author lost in the gap between virtual time and real time — just as his literary project is stranded between the virtual novel he promised his publisher and the real novel that is yet to be born.
The author, who undergoes tests for Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that has nothing to do with Texas, takes up a five-week residency in desolate Marfa, Texas, that proves as much a fiasco as the fellowship year the poet-narrator of “To the Atocha Station” spends in Spain. Instead of writing the novel he was contracted to deliver, he fritters his time away writing flaccid Whitmanesque verse that would have embarrassed the good gray poet of Brooklyn. Back home in Brooklyn, the author, “a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid,” wanders the city streets celebrating — and denigrating — himself and the multitudes he contains. Like Whitman, and like W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole, Ben Lerner is a courageous chronicler of meditative ambulation, of the mind reflecting on its own vibrant thinking processes before they congeal into inert thoughts. - Steven G. Kellman
Working at the Park Slope co-op, 10:04's unnamed narrator wants to give some advice to a fellow volunteer. The woman, Noor, has just revealed that, not long after her father's death, she learned her father wasn't actually her father. She associated with his Lebanese ancestry, and she has difficulty comprehending what that now entails, knowing her relatives in Beirut aren't actually her relatives. A published writer dealing with a successful publication, the narrator worries, though, that his encouraging words will register as "presumptuous co-op nonsense," if he claims 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."
Lifted from a Hasidic belief of the afterlife, the clause "where everything is the same but a little different" serves as the epigraph for Ben Lerner's second novel, becoming something close to a refrain. It's this notion—the ability, through art, to offer conflicting versions of the self—that Lerner, or Lerner's narrator, confronts. And it's to the author's great credit, most especially, that his words register not as "presumptuous co-op nonsense," as a pretentious or pedantic affront, but rather as a humorous and intelligent exploration of art's place in the present day.
Bookended by fictional versions of Hurricane Irene and Sandy, nothing much happens to the protagonist over the course of the narrative's year. The superstorms, much like the Madrid train bombings in Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, have little-to-no effect on the main character's own well-being. His only predicaments, really, are learning to live with a heart condition, completing a proposal (and the subsequent book), and serving as a sperm donor for his best friend, Alex, who wants a child but is unsure of her opinion on a fatherly presence.
If Leaving the Atocha Station is about Adam Gordon, the narrator on a prestigious poetry fellowship in Madrid, and his self-perception as a fraud (his inability to have "a profound experience of art"), then 10:04 is about how the protagonist, a young novelist with a successful debut and a recent short story in The New Yorker, handles the aftermath of bringing about certain experiences in others. Most of the reaction to The New Yorker short story and the first book, however, concerns people's obsessions with the works' level of autobiography, and it's Lerner's handling of this response, through rampant self-deprecation and deft humor, that separates 10:04 from other novels that focus on writers writing about writing.
In other words, the narrator is not an aloof artist, but someone absurdly tied-up in the daily neuroses of the modern world. He often clarifies complex theories with phrases like "whatever that means," halting the narrative when it's on the verge of being too serious, too didactic. He confirms things on Wikipedia, argues about the scientific inconsistencies in the Apollo moon landing, credits his origins as a poet to Ronald Reagan's speech following the Challenger disaster. At other points, he adopts a nocturnal schedule at a residency in Marfa, Texas, mocks the publishing industry ("publishers," his agent explains, will "pay for prestige"), helps a Hispanic student construct a book on the Brontosaurus and quells the child's fear of the YouTube-famous Joseph Kony. Internally, and with friends, he also offers poetic and nuanced readings of Jules Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc and Christian Marclay's film The Clock, a 24-hour-long montage, while also lauding Back to the Future (Lerner draws his title from the movie; it's the time when Marty returns to 1985). Most especially, when he lends an Occupy Wall Street protestor his shower and cooks for him a dinner of "prodigious blandness," they exchange a hysterical dialogue of misplaced masculinity: the "performance" of "piss[ing] in a urinal" and "tak[ing] out your dick," and acting "as if you were lifting some kind of weight." And when, too, he goes to New York-Presbyterian Hospital ("bank, medical office, and pornographic theater") to donate his sperm, his excessive hand washing and constant worry of contaminating the sample produces probably the funniest masturbation scene in literature.
10:04 is a complex text, if anything else, and one does run the risk of trying to put all of Lerner's fictional selves together, to mesh his one "joke cycle" into a coherent narrative. It's easy, that is, to attempt to arrive at the "a-ha" moment, to figure out what he means, to realize, as in finishing Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," that the man and woman have been talking about an abortion the whole time.
Reading Lerner's critical essay "Damage Control" in Harper's, about vandalism and art, for example, one could pull any number of obvious ideas that appear, or reappear, in his fiction. His description of Stendhal's protagonist, Fabrice, in The Charterhouse of Parma, "wander[ing] in confusion during the Battle of Waterloo, wondering...if he's participating in history" is Gordon's fear, in Leaving the Atocha Station, when the explosions go off. And Elka Krajewska's Salvage Art Institute provides the basis for 10:04's Institute for Totaled Art, where the narrator's love interest, Alena, acquires and showcases pieces deemed damaged, those "demoted from art to mere art object," those that would otherwise waste away, unseen in some storage facility. Furthermore, "what move[s] [Lerner] most," at the Salvage Art Institute, "[are] not those works that were clearly severely damaged…but those that [appear to him] identical to their former incarnation as economically valuable art," which reminds him of "an anecdote" he read about a certain Hasidic story on "the world to come."
And regardless of what that future is, Lerner has now established himself firmly in the realm of fiction, adding to his triumphs in poetry and criticism. He will prove, if not already, to be an important figure in contemporary American literature. Whatever that means. - Alex Norcia
Review by Maggie Nelson
Review by Christopher Wood
Review by Hari Kunzru
Review by Carolyn Kellogg
Review by Gabriel Roth
Review by Maddie Crum
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, Coffee House Press, 2011.
From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?
In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
Read what Lerner has to say about his novel in this essay:A little more than halfway through my novel, the narrator claims: “I will never write a novel.” It’s only one of many lies the radically unreliable Adam Gordon tells, but, like most of his lies, it contains an element of truth, indicating his resistance to many of the more conventional attributes of the genre: a tendency to reduce the irreducible messiness of experience to a neatly symmetrical plot, the way so many protagonists undergo an unambiguous journey of redemption. Adam Gordon—like me—is largely interested in something else: in depicting the arc and feel of (often neurotic) thinking, the texture of time as it passes in both dramatic and non-dramatic experience, and changes in personality that are too subtle or ambiguous to register in novels concerned with grand transformations. I came to write this novel, then, in part by working against an image of the conventional novel—by writing my resistance to the form into the form, narrating the pitfalls of narrative. Adam Gordon is a young poet abroad trying to figure out if he’s worthy of his art, if his art can endure in an age of mass media and spectacle, and so his coming of age as an artist—or, depending on your reading, his failure to come of age—isn’t just something the prose describes: it’s enacted in the writing itself.
Increasingly I feel that explanations of how a fiction arises are part of the fiction—that writers necessarily tell themselves a story about the origin of a work because it helps the work get written, or helps integrate it into a narrative that lets them move on to the next book. That said, part of why and how this novel originated feels clear to me. I’d just finished my third book of poems and felt like I’d temporarily exhausted my sense of the poetic line, that I wanted a break from the particular maddening challenges and pleasures of that form. Around the same time, I’d finished a long academic essay on the poems of John Ashbery, a poet who figures prominently in my novel (I stole the title, Leaving the Atocha Station, from one of his poems). Many of the concerns that I’d pursued in my poems and essays—how one makes verbal art with a language saturated by commercialism and militarism, the distance between what a poem aspires to do and what it can actually do, how the flow of time can be captured and intensified in a work of literature, etc.—remained my obsessions. I wanted to take these ideas about poetry and the arts and place them in a life, watch them spread out into a character’s experience, track their effects once they were placed in a particular body, mind, and time. One reason I love the novel—when I love it—as a genre is that it’s so absorptive; it can incorporate poems, the language of criticism, historical events, personal drama, etc. I think Leaving the Atocha Station came into being because at that particular juncture the novel allowed me to assimilate all my different languages and concerns into an overarching form.
Actually, I’m not sure I think that; I believed it when I wrote it, but now (a few days later), I think even that general description exaggerates the amount of conscious control I have over the direction my writing takes. As many writers would probably tell you, the form and content of an artwork largely have to be discovered in the act of composition; otherwise, what’s the point? Maybe I should just say that one day I started writing—I’m not sure why—sentences whose syntax captured the rhythm of this Adam Gordon character’s thinking. Even when I’d tried to write poems, all I could generate were more of Gordon’s sentences. In some ways he’s an exaggeration of my most unfortunate tendencies, and in other ways he’s entirely strange to me. The book that unfolded was as much an effect of his language controlling me as it was of my controlling his language. Tolstoy once told an acquaintance that he was hurrying home to see what Vronsky would do next, indicating, I think, how much a book develops according to concerns outside of authorial control. I suppose the novel itself is as close as I can get to an account of its genesis, describing, as it ultimately does, a young poet’s futile resistance to a novel’s demand to be written.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
Ben Lerner’s first novel, coming on the heels of three outstanding poetry collections, is a darkly hilarious examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be. Leaving the Atocha Station tells the story of Adam, a poet on a prestigious yearlong fellowship in Madrid. It is a quintessential modernist expat novel: Adam does very little but walk from celebrated place to celebrated place, brooding, doubting himself, half-understanding what’s said to him, and being increasingly ugly to the people around him. Typically, the expat novel is the ideal petri dish for an isolated protagonist to confront him- or herself in a lonely search for authenticity (think of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano), but as Lerner knows, that quest has become cliché. Adam grumbles that “nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is,” and that the “soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire’s packaged tours.”
The bulk of the book is about Adam’s wild insecurity. He fears that he is a fraud and that his fraudulence will be detected. He believes he might have no talent, that he received the grant due to the false ways he presents himself to others. He spends a tremendous amount of time arranging his face into appropriate positions, pretending to take notes when people are watching, and reciting memorized phrases—all in the hope of seeming intelligent.
And he is intelligent. At the heart of the book is a rather deep discussion of the function of art. As Adam sees it, art enables one to experience the movement or “texture” of time. For example, a John Ashbery poem is most successful not when it makes sense, exactly, but when it references sense, when in reading you feel “the arc and feel of thinking” and therefore are able to “experience your experience.” The rhythm of the thought, not the thought itself, is the great art. In this light Adam’s obsession with self-presentation takes on a new cast: He’s representing what a man in his situation would look like, what someone like him would be like—without the ambition of being that man, but merely of referencing him.
While the book clearly belongs to the modernist tradition, it is fiercely contemporary—not only in the pulsing presence of the Internet and antidepressants, but also in Adam’s assertion that one must wade through countless layers of fraudulence if one is ever to reach anything that feels truthful. It’s his sense of irony that isolates him and keeps him foreign, particularly when other characters know how to express themselves without making a philosophical conundrum out of it. Take Cyrus, Adam’s best friend and antipode. Off on his own expat adventure in the more humble destination of Mexico, Cyrus tells Adam a gorgeous, moving story—fittingly strained through an Internet-chat filter—of how he tried and failed to save a woman from drowning. He describes giving artificial respiration to her dead body, and his voice rises up off the page like an emissary from the real world (at last a man of action!). Cyrus’s voice reminds us how claustrophobic we’ve gotten, here in Spain with Adam, who is endlessly speculating on the experience of not having an experience of art and making up ludicrous stories about his family. But as Adam becomes more despicable, Lerner’s writing becomes more beautiful, funny, and revelatory. And the more pathetic his battle, the harder he flails, as he himself laments in deadpan understatement, “I wondered again if there were something wrong with me.” - Deb Olin Unferth
At the start of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam Gordon, a young American in Spain for a year on a fellowship, purportedly to write ‘a long, research-driven poem’ about the Spanish Civil War’s ‘literary legacy’, goes into the Prado and heads for Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. He has been standing in front of it every morning since he arrived in Madrid, but today he finds a man in his place, facing the painting – or maybe the wall. Adam gets irritated, waits for him to leave, then suddenly the man bursts into tears.
Was he, I wondered … having a profound experience of art? I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art, and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or a painting or piece of music ‘changed their life’, especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change.
Adam trails the man, who continues to ‘lose his shit’ in front of various paintings, through the gallery. Soon the guards become part of the spectacle: Adam finds their mute dilemma about whether to remove this possible lunatic from the gallery ‘more moving than any Pietà, Deposition or Annunciation’. Perhaps the sobbing man’s transports are deliberate, ‘intended to force the institution to face its contradiction in the person of these guards’. Yet doesn’t the prestige of the museum derive precisely from the idea that art can do this to people? Adam decides the man is himself a ‘great artist’, and follows him out of the museum, leading us into ‘the preternaturally bright day’, and into a narrative in which the artifice of life exerts more of a pull on Adam than the artifice of any art.
Over the past eight years, Ben Lerner, who is 33, has published three poetry collections. The poems’ many preoccupations recur in the novel: war, women, America, American idioms, communication, emptiness, the suburbs, video games. In interviews Lerner has talked about playing video games as a child: ‘I don’t remember the plot [of the game King’s Quest] exactly, but it was this very rudimentary but absorptive world you could wander around, looking for magic rings and weapons and encountering gnomes. I liked that the world was enchanted but also how boring it was … I would often just wander between screens for hours.’ This is a pretty good description of Adam’s experience in Madrid: he mostly wanders around. He encounters gnomes (other people), attends enchanting but boring literary events. He tries to avoid María José, the director of the foundation that gave him his fellowship. He idly composes ‘translations’ and conducts variably successful romances with two Spanish women. He smokes hash, hangs out on the roof of his apartment, makes coffee, takes showers, reads the New York Times online, and finds himself caught up in debates about Spanish politics and Spanish poetry, neither of which he knows anything about. He suffers anxiety attacks, pops pills, reads John Ashbery and sits in the park, where he fails to work.
As in a video game, it’s not exactly what happens that counts: what’s important is how deeply you’re drawn into the world of the game, how transfixed you become. Adam is drawn deeply into his new world, and into his own thoughts. So are we: there’s tremendous verisimilitude in this short novel, and a pace that feels oddly familiar – like childhood summers, or stretches of unemployment, those times when one day seeps languidly into the next, coloured by the awareness that this time will eventually run out. Single sentences often elaborate an entire argument, or destroy an illusion; some sentences fall flat, brief and emotionless between longer ones that hypnotically work themselves up. The technique sometimes builds tension and sometimes deflates it:
The hardest part of quitting [smoking] would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined ‘settling down’, not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.
Soon after the scene in the museum comes the one moment in the book when Adam is genuinely moved by art. He is (significantly) not in a gallery, but at a backyard party, late at night. A guitarist is playing, and though Adam is suspicious (‘everyone seemed to be having a profound experience of art’), the musician is truly good, and soon Adam admits: ‘I began to hear the music, to hear it as addressing me.’ The song transports him all the way back to his childhood in Kansas, to being dropped off at a preschool called ‘Bright Circle Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car’. Twenty minutes later, Adam has his head on the shoulder of the pretty Teresa, whom he has just met, and he is feigning tears, having just told her that his mother is dead, a lie. He experiences a deep ‘self-disgust’, realising that when his mother actually dies, ‘whatever she suffered would be traceable in some important sense to this exact moment when I traded her life for the sympathy of an attractive stranger.’ And so mere moments after the transports of art have been acknowledged as possible, the idea that they might lead anywhere good – or bring any moral uplift or change in character – is quickly dismissed. There’s no evidence here that art, and therefore poetry, can save us.
One of the most exciting aspects of Leaving the Atocha Station is seeing a dedicated poet write a novel that addresses poetry’s limitations. Lerner reproduces a passage from an essay he wrote about his idol, Ashbery, one of whose poems gives the book its title. Lerner says that Ashbery’s best poems are written as if ‘on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you [see] only the reflection of your reading’. This ‘keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror’. This is like looking at a poem the way a misogynist looks at a woman. To claim that something’s great virtue is that it obligingly recedes from view, its disappearance finally allowing you to focus on yourself, reminds me of Orlando: ‘As long as she thinks of a man,’ Woolf writes, ‘nobody objects to a woman thinking.’ The corollary here is: as long as it leads a man to think only of himself, nobody could object to a poem. Adam’s frustration with poetry also comes out of the blue, in witty asides: ‘I had never travelled by rail, as archaic a method of conveyance … as poetry.’ His anxiety about whether anyone can have a profound experience of art extends to not believing that anyone can have a profound experience of him. It’s as though he believes himself to be a poem, an ineffective conveyor of meaning. He imagines that the women who like him like only the image they’re projecting. He asserts about his sort-of-girlfriend Isabel that ‘her experience of my body … was more her experience of her experience of her body … which meant my body was dissolved.’
But he is ‘dissolved’ much more by his own deceptions. Although he has internet access in his apartment, he replies to only some of his emails, and always in brief, claiming to be writing from an internet café in order to ‘create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience, while in fact I spent a good amount of time online’. At a party filled with handsome, well-dressed people, only a few moments pass before he tries to conceal his unworthiness with a well-practised formula. He opens his eyes ‘to a very specific point’ and sets his mouth in such a way that it communicated
a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings … insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null … I was a figure for the outside to this life … an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.
Of course, it used to be common for artists to speak earnestly of themselves as ambassadors from realities ‘more immediate and just’. Here’s Paul Gauguin, on arrival in Tahiti, writing to his wife (who was in Paris with their five children): ‘I have escaped everything that is artificial and conventional. Here I enter into truth, become one with Nature.’
Adam leaves home too, but he escapes nothing. He can’t abandon the artificial because he is the artificial. Actually, all the poets in Atocha are phoneys (one ‘looked less like he was going to read poetry and more like he was going to sing flamenco or weep’). Only the non-poets live honestly, without artifice, spontaneously. The real contemporary artist is not someone who feels more, or more intensely, but someone who feels less. When Adam appears to have lost both of his romantic prospects, and doubles his meds, he feels ‘almost nothing at all’ and is finally inspired, able to ‘read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall’. Leaving the Atocha Station is partly a description of the inner territory of a new kind of American artist: cold, lazy, artificial, yet oddly honourable given the extreme honesty and thoroughness of his self-scrutiny. One half-wonders if, in the future, this model will loom as large in the minds of young artists as the Romantics and the modernists do in ours; if young poets will anxiously scramble to prove they spent all day online, when in fact they were out in the world, shamefacedly collecting experiences.
Only one genuine ‘experience’ is had in this book, and it’s had by Adam’s friend Cyrus, who’s travelling with his girlfriend in Mexico. Lerner relates the incident through a conversation over instant messenger. Cyrus and his girlfriend go swimming in a river, while a few yards away two men encourage a woman, reluctant and scared, to jump in. She does.
CYRUS: but as she kind of splashed around – she didn’t really know how to swim, it didn’t seem. I don’t know, she moved somewhat downriver where the current became pretty strong, and she was getting upset
ME: so someone helped her?
CYRUS: Things
CYRUS: things got very bad very fast. she went under water for a second, and when she resurfaced, she was a little further down and totally panicked
ME: jesus
CYRUS: She was screaming and water was
ME: jesus
Adam is most engaged when Cyrus is relating an experience you might put in a novel (watching someone die), the kind Adam, in his endless wanderings, longs to have. (Our lives are not like novels; at best, our friends’ lives are.) Even when History touches down in his life – he’s in Madrid during the 11 March train bombings at Atocha station (‘It’s history in the making,’ Teresa says) – his cast of mind remains resolutely ahistorical and undramatic: ‘I said to myself that History was being made and that I needed to be with Spaniards to experience it … [but] I knew I was only elaborating an excuse to see Teresa. I tried to justify my pettiness by meditating on the relation of the personal to the historical but my meditations did not go far.’
Although there are two love interests in the novel, Teresa and Isabel, it is far from being a love story. Adam is too preoccupied to see the women clearly, let alone love them: he thinks of them in distorted ways, and always in relation to himself. Mostly they are tempting him in their unconscious poses, or giving him what he wants, or withholding it. This makes it difficult for us to connect to them (just as he doesn’t), or to understand their motivation (he doesn’t), or really to tell them apart (he barely can; he longs for one when he is with the other; he thinks he prefers Teresa; no, he prefers Isabel; no, he prefers Teresa). In the end, it doesn’t really matter which he chooses. They function as talismans, to ward off the spectre of (masculine) inferiority. Adam’s true love affair is with himself.
It’s hard not to take Adam’s life as a version of Lerner’s: both are young poets raised in Topeka, Kansas; both spent time in New York among ‘the dim kids of the stars’; both spent a year in Madrid on a poetry fellowship (Adam’s unnamed; Lerner’s a Fulbright). If you were to see, at a fancy-dress party, a man dressed up in the clothes he wears every day, you would not know whether he was dressing up as himself, or not dressing up at all. That’s part of the frisson of this book. But there’s a deeper thrill. You start to register tiny communiqués between the Adam who is living the book, the Adam who is writing it and the Adam who is reading what he has written: ‘These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate.’ Elsewhere: ‘Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.’ The book often seems less like a novel, a public performance, than an inward-looking text to which we have been given access, something like a diary, or notes towards a future work.
Throughout, Adam marks time by telling us how far along he is in his ‘project’ (‘this anxiety was characteristic of my project’s fourth phase’), but it’s never stated what the project is – it’s obviously not the poem about the Spanish Civil War, which Adam doesn’t even think about. It seems to be something more than just an artwork, and more diffuse, something vital at which he might fail. It also seems to be something of which he is the true audience, and most ruthless judge.
Late in the novel, Adam goes with Teresa to Barcelona. On leaving the hotel to fetch their morning coffee, he promptly gets lost, and spends all day wandering around the city in a panic. He ducks into a video-game arcade, hunkers down in a plastic, car-shaped pod, and launches into a pained self-critique:
I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it … I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz.
It’s hardly rock-bottom, though. He is still able to tell himself a romantic story about himself. (Yes, he was sleeping at the Ritz, but it was only for a night.) His real tumble to earth comes days later in Madrid, when Teresa turns on him for being convinced his appearance on a panel of Spanish poets will reveal him to be a fraud: ‘Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet … When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?’ He wonders: ‘Was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant?’ The organisers want the input of a young American writer abroad, ‘and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.’
We realise, as Adam does, that it’s true. He’s no impostor. His anxiety and poses have just been a way of elaborating and extending himself, a drug more potent than his pot or his pills. Adam is not a poem. He’s a person. The American ideal of freedom and self-invention has its limits; he’s a product of his context and class, and a moment later he knows that ‘I would never live away from my family and language permanently.’ He will return to America once his fellowship is done, and memory and age will have their way, turning what was complicated and complex into something ordered, understood and tame. His year in Spain will become simply ‘a last or nearly last hurrah of juvenility, but it would not, in any serious sense, form part of my life … I would compose a one or two-sentence summary of my time in Spain for those who queried me about my experience abroad … everything else would be excised.’ All his anxious self-exertions are just ways of delaying growing up. Or an even more prosaic fate: becoming a novelist.
Finally, we are treated to that most novelistic device: a happy ending. But in this case it is only subtly happy. Adam sits alone, and reading a poem aloud in Spanish, doesn’t ‘hear an American accent’. Instead of anxiously keeping secret the party for the chapbook he has written, ‘I’d even agreed to forward the announcement to my entire inbox.’ As he makes his way to the party, he discovers that ‘if I was nervous, it was only about the fact that I wasn’t nervous.’ Even the dreaded María José from the foundation ‘was surprisingly warm; we kissed each other without irony.’ - Sheila Heti
The hardest part of quitting [smoking] would be the loss of narrative function; it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age; there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined ‘settling down’, not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.
Soon after the scene in the museum comes the one moment in the book when Adam is genuinely moved by art. He is (significantly) not in a gallery, but at a backyard party, late at night. A guitarist is playing, and though Adam is suspicious (‘everyone seemed to be having a profound experience of art’), the musician is truly good, and soon Adam admits: ‘I began to hear the music, to hear it as addressing me.’ The song transports him all the way back to his childhood in Kansas, to being dropped off at a preschool called ‘Bright Circle Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car’. Twenty minutes later, Adam has his head on the shoulder of the pretty Teresa, whom he has just met, and he is feigning tears, having just told her that his mother is dead, a lie. He experiences a deep ‘self-disgust’, realising that when his mother actually dies, ‘whatever she suffered would be traceable in some important sense to this exact moment when I traded her life for the sympathy of an attractive stranger.’ And so mere moments after the transports of art have been acknowledged as possible, the idea that they might lead anywhere good – or bring any moral uplift or change in character – is quickly dismissed. There’s no evidence here that art, and therefore poetry, can save us.
One of the most exciting aspects of Leaving the Atocha Station is seeing a dedicated poet write a novel that addresses poetry’s limitations. Lerner reproduces a passage from an essay he wrote about his idol, Ashbery, one of whose poems gives the book its title. Lerner says that Ashbery’s best poems are written as if ‘on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you [see] only the reflection of your reading’. This ‘keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror’. This is like looking at a poem the way a misogynist looks at a woman. To claim that something’s great virtue is that it obligingly recedes from view, its disappearance finally allowing you to focus on yourself, reminds me of Orlando: ‘As long as she thinks of a man,’ Woolf writes, ‘nobody objects to a woman thinking.’ The corollary here is: as long as it leads a man to think only of himself, nobody could object to a poem. Adam’s frustration with poetry also comes out of the blue, in witty asides: ‘I had never travelled by rail, as archaic a method of conveyance … as poetry.’ His anxiety about whether anyone can have a profound experience of art extends to not believing that anyone can have a profound experience of him. It’s as though he believes himself to be a poem, an ineffective conveyor of meaning. He imagines that the women who like him like only the image they’re projecting. He asserts about his sort-of-girlfriend Isabel that ‘her experience of my body … was more her experience of her experience of her body … which meant my body was dissolved.’
But he is ‘dissolved’ much more by his own deceptions. Although he has internet access in his apartment, he replies to only some of his emails, and always in brief, claiming to be writing from an internet café in order to ‘create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience, while in fact I spent a good amount of time online’. At a party filled with handsome, well-dressed people, only a few moments pass before he tries to conceal his unworthiness with a well-practised formula. He opens his eyes ‘to a very specific point’ and sets his mouth in such a way that it communicated
a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings … insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null … I was a figure for the outside to this life … an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.
Of course, it used to be common for artists to speak earnestly of themselves as ambassadors from realities ‘more immediate and just’. Here’s Paul Gauguin, on arrival in Tahiti, writing to his wife (who was in Paris with their five children): ‘I have escaped everything that is artificial and conventional. Here I enter into truth, become one with Nature.’
Adam leaves home too, but he escapes nothing. He can’t abandon the artificial because he is the artificial. Actually, all the poets in Atocha are phoneys (one ‘looked less like he was going to read poetry and more like he was going to sing flamenco or weep’). Only the non-poets live honestly, without artifice, spontaneously. The real contemporary artist is not someone who feels more, or more intensely, but someone who feels less. When Adam appears to have lost both of his romantic prospects, and doubles his meds, he feels ‘almost nothing at all’ and is finally inspired, able to ‘read and write for hours on end with what felt like total concentration, barely noticing nightfall’. Leaving the Atocha Station is partly a description of the inner territory of a new kind of American artist: cold, lazy, artificial, yet oddly honourable given the extreme honesty and thoroughness of his self-scrutiny. One half-wonders if, in the future, this model will loom as large in the minds of young artists as the Romantics and the modernists do in ours; if young poets will anxiously scramble to prove they spent all day online, when in fact they were out in the world, shamefacedly collecting experiences.
Only one genuine ‘experience’ is had in this book, and it’s had by Adam’s friend Cyrus, who’s travelling with his girlfriend in Mexico. Lerner relates the incident through a conversation over instant messenger. Cyrus and his girlfriend go swimming in a river, while a few yards away two men encourage a woman, reluctant and scared, to jump in. She does.
CYRUS: but as she kind of splashed around – she didn’t really know how to swim, it didn’t seem. I don’t know, she moved somewhat downriver where the current became pretty strong, and she was getting upset
ME: so someone helped her?
CYRUS: Things
CYRUS: things got very bad very fast. she went under water for a second, and when she resurfaced, she was a little further down and totally panicked
ME: jesus
CYRUS: She was screaming and water was
ME: jesus
Adam is most engaged when Cyrus is relating an experience you might put in a novel (watching someone die), the kind Adam, in his endless wanderings, longs to have. (Our lives are not like novels; at best, our friends’ lives are.) Even when History touches down in his life – he’s in Madrid during the 11 March train bombings at Atocha station (‘It’s history in the making,’ Teresa says) – his cast of mind remains resolutely ahistorical and undramatic: ‘I said to myself that History was being made and that I needed to be with Spaniards to experience it … [but] I knew I was only elaborating an excuse to see Teresa. I tried to justify my pettiness by meditating on the relation of the personal to the historical but my meditations did not go far.’
Although there are two love interests in the novel, Teresa and Isabel, it is far from being a love story. Adam is too preoccupied to see the women clearly, let alone love them: he thinks of them in distorted ways, and always in relation to himself. Mostly they are tempting him in their unconscious poses, or giving him what he wants, or withholding it. This makes it difficult for us to connect to them (just as he doesn’t), or to understand their motivation (he doesn’t), or really to tell them apart (he barely can; he longs for one when he is with the other; he thinks he prefers Teresa; no, he prefers Isabel; no, he prefers Teresa). In the end, it doesn’t really matter which he chooses. They function as talismans, to ward off the spectre of (masculine) inferiority. Adam’s true love affair is with himself.
It’s hard not to take Adam’s life as a version of Lerner’s: both are young poets raised in Topeka, Kansas; both spent time in New York among ‘the dim kids of the stars’; both spent a year in Madrid on a poetry fellowship (Adam’s unnamed; Lerner’s a Fulbright). If you were to see, at a fancy-dress party, a man dressed up in the clothes he wears every day, you would not know whether he was dressing up as himself, or not dressing up at all. That’s part of the frisson of this book. But there’s a deeper thrill. You start to register tiny communiqués between the Adam who is living the book, the Adam who is writing it and the Adam who is reading what he has written: ‘These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate.’ Elsewhere: ‘Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.’ The book often seems less like a novel, a public performance, than an inward-looking text to which we have been given access, something like a diary, or notes towards a future work.
Throughout, Adam marks time by telling us how far along he is in his ‘project’ (‘this anxiety was characteristic of my project’s fourth phase’), but it’s never stated what the project is – it’s obviously not the poem about the Spanish Civil War, which Adam doesn’t even think about. It seems to be something more than just an artwork, and more diffuse, something vital at which he might fail. It also seems to be something of which he is the true audience, and most ruthless judge.
Late in the novel, Adam goes with Teresa to Barcelona. On leaving the hotel to fetch their morning coffee, he promptly gets lost, and spends all day wandering around the city in a panic. He ducks into a video-game arcade, hunkers down in a plastic, car-shaped pod, and launches into a pained self-critique:
I wasn’t capable of fetching coffee in this country, let alone understanding its civil war. I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra. I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American. I was never going to flatten space or shatter it … I was a pothead, maybe an alcoholic. When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz.
It’s hardly rock-bottom, though. He is still able to tell himself a romantic story about himself. (Yes, he was sleeping at the Ritz, but it was only for a night.) His real tumble to earth comes days later in Madrid, when Teresa turns on him for being convinced his appearance on a panel of Spanish poets will reveal him to be a fraud: ‘Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet … When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?’ He wonders: ‘Was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant?’ The organisers want the input of a young American writer abroad, ‘and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent.’
We realise, as Adam does, that it’s true. He’s no impostor. His anxiety and poses have just been a way of elaborating and extending himself, a drug more potent than his pot or his pills. Adam is not a poem. He’s a person. The American ideal of freedom and self-invention has its limits; he’s a product of his context and class, and a moment later he knows that ‘I would never live away from my family and language permanently.’ He will return to America once his fellowship is done, and memory and age will have their way, turning what was complicated and complex into something ordered, understood and tame. His year in Spain will become simply ‘a last or nearly last hurrah of juvenility, but it would not, in any serious sense, form part of my life … I would compose a one or two-sentence summary of my time in Spain for those who queried me about my experience abroad … everything else would be excised.’ All his anxious self-exertions are just ways of delaying growing up. Or an even more prosaic fate: becoming a novelist.
Finally, we are treated to that most novelistic device: a happy ending. But in this case it is only subtly happy. Adam sits alone, and reading a poem aloud in Spanish, doesn’t ‘hear an American accent’. Instead of anxiously keeping secret the party for the chapbook he has written, ‘I’d even agreed to forward the announcement to my entire inbox.’ As he makes his way to the party, he discovers that ‘if I was nervous, it was only about the fact that I wasn’t nervous.’ Even the dreaded María José from the foundation ‘was surprisingly warm; we kissed each other without irony.’ - Sheila Heti
Seventy years ago Albert Camus published the novel known in English as The Outsider: a short and vivid monologue that – I remember this from school – doubles as some kind of philosophical manifesto. The narrator, Meursault, is a French Algerian whose mother is reported dead in the famous opening sentence; later, on a beach, he will murder someone – an Arab, as the song by the Cure reminded us in 1979 – for almost no reason.
Ben Lerner's remarkable first novel is narrated by a different kind of outsider: a young American living in Madrid on a poetry scholarship in 2004. Adam Gordon suffers frequently from linguistic dislocation and – permanently – from bipolarity which he self-medicates with a cocktail of prescription drugs, coffee, nicotine, booze and marijuana. Meursault is trapped in the sun-dazzle of the moment. Adam drifts, benumbed and stoned, through a Madrid that sometimes fails to match the depths of his self-absorption: "I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Or was it cloudy?" And yet the apprehended city floats before the reader with a limpid and oneiric grace: a self-portrait in a constantly distorting mirror. Young couples are seen "displaying their mutual absorption on nearly every bench"; Adam and a girlfriend see themselves "reflected vaguely in the silver of passing buses."
Bewildered, lacking motivation, filled with tides of rage that never manifest themselves in action, he becomes part of the art-poetry-stoner crowd. When chunks of Spanish conversation become hard to follow he zones out, leaving his face to enact the role of involved listener and participant. This doesn't always work; early on that face gets punched for smiling while a young woman, Isabel, is telling a tragic story. Later, when they are romantically involved, he tells Isabel that his mother has died and that his father is a fascist and bully. There's a logic of self-pitying ingratiation at work here; after all, he reasons, hasn't every Spanish movie since 1975 been about "killing, literally or symbolically, some pathologically strict, repressed, and violent father"? That his mother is alive and his father the "gentlest of men" is irrelevant. If Meursault was marooned in a realm of absolute sensual truth Adam says whatever swirls into his head in any given situation, often turning linguistic fallibility into vatic profundity. His pronouncements have the same relation to the verifiable world as a poem by John Ashbery (from whom Lerner takes his title). The best of these poems, Adam decides, "describe what it's like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces. And when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately." A number of crazed essay-reflections like this, on poetry and art, flow through the book.
Which starts with Adam visiting the Prado to stand in front of Roger van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross, hoping for "a profound experience of art" that never takes place: "The closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity." Situation and rhythm – those hypnotic, self-cancelling repetitions are a feature of the novel – are reminiscent of the opening of Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard (a surprising but important influence in current American fiction).
Camus, Ashbery, Bernhard… It's the familiar paradox whereby a genealogy powerfully suggests itself in a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future. Other testimonies in this line of alienated descent might be Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and – bringing us back to America – Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Percy's narrator is preoccupied by "the search", by "what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island." Lerner's narrator is so not-himself, so at sea in the un-everydayness of everyday life in Spain, that, having stepped outside for coffee during a trip to Barcelona, he spends 12 hours trying to find his way back to the hotel. "I felt like a character in The Passenger, a movie I had never seen. When I resumed my search…"
I point out the tracks of these earlier narrative guides confidently and inconclusively; they seem obvious to me but it's quite possible they played no part whatsoever in the gestation and composition of Lerner's novel. What they share, however (with the lyrically earnest exception of Camus), is a devastating humour. Gales of laughter howl through Leaving the Atocha Station. It's packed full of gags (Adam is convinced that Ortega y Gasset is two people, like Deleuze and Guattari) and page-long one-liners itemising the narrator's ghostly immunity to normal human relations. Adam is a repellent figure ("I imagined breaking the bottle over her head….") or would be were it not for the self-lacerating ("…then raking my throat with the jagged glass") consciousness of that awfulness. Spanish friends tell him he's a talented poet; he knows he's just "a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life". Hostile to his fellow Americans, especially those seeking to avoid their fellow Americans, Adam concludes that "nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that [this] soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours". As in Bernhard, the twists, surges and reversals of intention generate a propulsion routinely provided by characters and plot. As with the Ashbery poem, the novel is self-captioning, a dramatised commentary on the experience of reading it: "I came to realise that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine."
This, needless to say, will not be to everyone's taste. Otherwise sympathetic readers will struggle to tell apart the two beautiful women with whom Adam is involved: both intensely desirable, and both possessed of a limitless capacity to indulge the solipsistic poet-fraud in their midst. When the Atocha station is bombed by al-Qaida, Adam tells himself that "History was being made and… I needed to be with Spaniards to experience it" but the subsequent demonstrations and vigils serve mainly to confirm a disassociation that, while extreme, remains an unorthodox investigative tool. After the attacks, with the election of Zapatero imminent, an activist tells Adam that he has been "up all night protesting and partying. I asked if those were the same things, protesting and partying." The question is not asked maliciously and the book never feels like satire. What is does feel like is intensely and unusually brilliant. Beyond that, I don't know quite what it is – and I like it all the more for that. It was first published in the US by Coffee House Press, Minnesota, which deserves the loudest possible praise for its initiative and success in doing so. Editors at the big, corporate houses must be kicking themselves. - Geoff Dyer
Review by Gary Sernovitz
Review by James Wood
Review by Jenny Turner
Interview by Teddy Wayne
Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu
"Employing the language of aphorism, advertising, parable, personal essay, political tirade, journalism and journal, the collage-like poems of Lerner's second collection express the ennui of American life in an era when even war feels like a television event. Two sequences of untitled prose poems weave public and private discourse, yielding often absurd yet frighteningly accurate observations: 'We have willingly suspended our disbelief on strings in order to manipulate it from above'; 'Some child actors have never been off camera'; 'The right to have it both ways is inalienable or it isn't.' Punctuating the prose are three extended free verse pieces, including 'Didactic Elegy,' a self-conscious, heady meditation on the collapse of the World Trade towers that is equal parts logic-proof, art criticism and subtle indictment of American mourning for 9/11: 'The first men and women to be described as heroes were in the towers./ To call them heroes, however, implies that they were willing to accept their deaths.' A handful of the more fragmentary poems in this long collection lack the satisfying associative logic and punch that characterize the best of these, and could have been omitted, but overall this collection places Lerner (The Lichtenberg Figures, 2004) among the most promising young poets now writing." - Publishers Weekly
"Though the words appear sparse on the page, Angle of Yaw is a dense book, dense with ideas and ambition. Of course, at 28, you don’t get to be on Copper Canyon Press, with your second book nominated for the National Book Award, without being ambitious. A graduate of Brown University, Ben Lerner won the Hayden Carruth award for his first book (The Lichtenberg Figures) in 2003, and co-founded and co-edits the well-endowed (hefty, glossy) No: A journal of the arts.
With Angle of Yaw, 125 pages of lined poetry and prose poems, Ben Lerner establishes himself as someone to be taken seriously. He largely eschews the methods of collage and the artful non sequitur so popular with many of his young contemporaries. (In one poem, the line “Non sequitur rendered lyric by a retrospective act of will” is dropped to the floor with a mock-innocent whistle.) More a thought poet than a language poet, Lerner prefers to engage in cognitive play, though he does so at the level of language. Not everyone thinks in sentences, but Lerner seems to. In this collection he dabbles in semiotics and semantics, but the subject matter also encompasses social criticism and criticism qua criticism, as well as technology, from children’s games to Jumbotrons. Lerner’s range of tones includes cheeky wit, intellectual curiosity, and barely concealed disgust. He trembles at turns with cynical anger, at turns with a composed terror of the future-that-is-now.
It’s a lot to take in—and that’s a good thing—but occasionally the book feels tonally problematic. The prose poems (grouped into two long sections both named “Angle of Yaw”) betray a perplexity at the world, through holes in their knowing irony. The lyrics, however, can come off as a little smug or preachy. In a poem on page 8, a group of “tomahawking redskin fans” are swiftly made into patriotic automatons: “Support your polis: chop the air.” (I longed for the levity of a final exclamation point there.)
This appears in the first section of the book, entitled “Begetting Stadia,” an examination of the concept of the collective in U.S. society, which so often involves a kind of sportsmanlike spectatorship. Americans like to watch, or, at least, don’t know how not to. We watch all the time. We watch what we’re not supposed to watch (“The woman attends the night game to watch the snow fall near the lights”), and we watch what we never before had the ability to—advances like aerial photography, medical imaging, and electron microscopes give us new ways of seeing. When Lerner writes, “The tree in your mind // is mine,” he points to the power problem inherent in vision—we want what we see. It creates the illusion of control, and a need to make that illusion real. Lerner suggests that when man achieved a view of the earth from above—from a blimp, or a spaceship—we began to play God. Or, we became God. An astronaut from China claims “the only man-made structure visible from the shuttle is the Great Wall.” (What about “the light from the Luxor Casino?” Lerner wonders.) “For visible from space read in the eyes of God.” But living like God, above the world, may not be so easy for us mortals: “Delivering supplies from the air is no problem. But to the air?”
How we see, for Lerner, is intimately connected to how we read, another theme of the book. The poem reprinted on the back cover (a starkly spooky sci-fi-ish cover) begins, “Reading is important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame. When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child.” Like the complex formations of a marching band on a football field, visible in their entirety only via an overhead picture projected back to the fans in the stadium, vertical texts and images are meant to be received by groups, the multitudes, society. They are messages from the management, from above. Because we are always watching, we are also always reading, often inadvertently. “The average reader […] will process and even vocalize a text he believes himself to be composing, while in fact reading skywriting.” At worst, we regurgitate propaganda; at best, we commit unconscious plagiarism.
Lerner seems poignantly aware of this danger, if it can be called that, to the artist (the horror of committing the crime seems worse than falling victim to it); one poem proclaims, “Not having read the author in question is no defense against the charge of plagiarism.” And yet heavy appropriation—draping one’s self with one’s influences—is another mark of the current poetic landscape. For example, Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* plunders any number of texts (to wonderful effect). Boully quotes from her source texts at will and generally without the use of quotation marks. Lerner, too, often opts not to use quotation marks or italics within Angle of Yaw, but for different, if related, reasons. Rather than burying authorial references, he buries the symbolic referents of words themselves. The book’s first prose poem contains the line: “A beware of dog on keep off grass.” Lerner’s clever choice not to mark any of these words with quotes or italics destabilizes the reader: what level of signage are we at? The referent wavers—is that just a dog, or the word dog, or a sign with the word dog on it: “BEWARE OF DOG”? A later poem commands, “Shovel snow from the path; file snow under snow.” In other words, while you literally (ack) pile snow upon snow, categorize “snow” beneath the rubric of snow. Lerner manipulates the text to demonstrate that texts are intrinsically manipulative. It’s brain-tickling and very effective.
The tonal unevenness I earlier alluded to in Angle of Yaw is only partially mediated by Lerner’s embedded apologies/excuses for his attitude: “The smugness masks a higher sadness.” When I read the line “We are trying too hard not to be funny,” I sort of agreed. But some of these poems are in fact very funny, and they are among the most successful. One prose poem is a hilarious (to me) send-up of playtime in the postmodern age:
The girl plays with nonrepresentational dolls. Her games are devoid of any narrative content, amusements that depend upon their own intrinsic form. If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy. Her favorite toy was a notion about color. She lost it in the snow.
On the opposite page, there’s a similarly delightful piece, almost a short short, that combines elements of Paul Auster and Jorge Luis Borges in a little detective story where representation and causation are confused and intertwined—the detective, creating a pushpin map of a series of killings, realizes the killer is arranging his victims in the shape of a smiley face. “The detective knows, and the shooter knows the detective knows, that the shooter must complete the upward curving of the mouth.” I couldn’t help but grin at the grim absurdity of this. And at Lerner’s lovely way of turning the tale in on itself: “The shooter dreams of pushing a red tack into the map, not of putting a bullet into a body. The detective […] drives metal stakes into the ground to indicate the tacks.”
The book’s third section of poems, “Didactic Elegy,” is about art, and art after 9/11. (This may just be one poem; none of the individual pieces in the book are titled.) Lerner here, as elsewhere in the book, explores how images of reality warp and shape reality. Repeatedly, he implies that as representations of the world become more realistic, reality necessarily becomes less realistic; the two become indistinguishable. The view from the airplane looks more and more like our simulators. War morphs into a sophisticated video game: “Points are taken away for killing civilians, but points are irrelevant.” Again here the poetry is broken into lines. Oddly, the lineated poems in Angle of Yaw tend to sound less like poetry. This piece moves syntactically, paratactically like an essay, as in this very prose-like (I hate to use the pejorative “prosaic”) stanza:
By economy I mean that the field is apprehension in its idle form.
The eye constitutes any disturbance in the field as an object.
This is the grammatical function of the eye. To distinguish between objects,
the eye assigns value where there is none.As an essay in poem form, or vice versa, this is less successful than, say, Anne Carson’s hybrids in books like Glass, Irony, and God, Men in the Off Hours, and the recent Decreation—in that I remained partially unconvinced that poetic lines were the form best serving this content. However, this section contains some of Lerner’s most brilliant ideas, like “The phrase unfinished masterpiece is redundant.” Lerner puts forth that the most enduring art remains always open to interpretation, and reinterpretation, so that new audiences can experience its power though removed from its original historical context. “For example, / if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,” he writes, our national body of art necessarily undergoes a “reassignation of value.” The masterpieces are those objects of art that are perpetually relevant.
Luckily for us readers, the bulk of this book consists of prose poems—one justified block per page, averaging about a hundred words each—and in these Lerner seems to have really found his form. In the second “Angle of Yaw” section, he again and again concocts just the right admixture of wonder, complicity, and wry edge, with a powerful cumulative effect. Anyone who pushes past the first ten or so slightly unwelcoming pages in Angle of Yaw will be rewarded with many more pages full of Lerner’s quirky and sometimes profound musings:
The phobic […] must be conditioned to fear the opposite of what they fear. The difficulty of such a treatment lies in finding the counterbalancing terror. What is the opposite of a marketplace? A prime number? Blood? A spider?
*
If you don’t secure your own mask first, you’ll just sit there stroking the child’s hair.
*
When a child dies in a novel, he enters the world. And writes the novel.
The final section of the book, “Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan,” differs from the other non-prose poems in a couple of ways. These seven pages unmistakably constitute one poem, and they feel unmistakably like poetry rather than prose. Lerner achieves a hypnotic rhythm through a series of declarative sentences, which seem to emerge from a medley of speakers:
A child could have painted that.
We dipped cicadas in WD-40 and ignited them with punks.
Magnetic resonance imaging reveals a degenerate hemisphere.
A diamond cheval-de-frise tops the White House.
The floral arrangement is based on outmoded ideology.
I am unmatched in my portrayal of subtle human emotions.
Workers report cracks in our mode.
There is no beauty like the beauty of a throwaway line
the split second before it’s thrown.This poem is political without being preachy. One of the strengths of Angle of Yaw is its wholesale rejection of solipsism — Lerner isn’t interested in proving that his singular viewpoint of the cosmos is unique. He’s far more interested in speaking for, or as, the collective. If anyone happens to be listening...
...I think we need, and need to read, more books like this one: more poems that don’t content themselves with pretty language and images. This is brainy poetry that approaches the level of theory. It will challenge you as a reader and as a citizen. You don’t need to read it out loud to appreciate it. In fact, read it in bed, alone, with a flashlight. Let it creep you out." - Elisa Gabbert
From Angle of Yaw:
THE FIRST GAMING SYSTEM was the domesticated flame. Contemporary video games allow you to select the angle from which you view the action, inspiring a rash of high school massacres. Newer games, with their use of small strokes to simulate reflected light, are all but unintelligible to older players. We have abstracted airplanes from our simulators in the hope of manipulating flight as such. Game cheats, special codes that make your character invincible or rich, alter weather conditions or allow you to bypass a narrative stage, stand in relation to video games as prayer to reality. Children, if pushed, will attempt to inflict game cheats on the phenomenal world. Enter up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, a, to tear open the sky. Left, left, b, b, to keep warm.
NO MATTER HOW BIG YOU MAKE A TOY, a child will find a way to put it in his mouth. There is scarcely a piece of playground equipment that has not been inside a child's mouth. However, the object responsible for the greatest number of choking deaths, for adults as well as children, is the red balloon. Last year alone, every American choked to death on a red balloon.
Interview by Tao Lin
Interview by Adam Fitzgerald
Ben Lerner & Ariana Reines
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.