Like Lerner’s previous novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” this is a book about self-consciousness. Though “10:04” is preoccupied by the narrator’s relationship to others, particularly the possibility of “coconstructing” a child with Alex, his real compulsion is himself.
As he cooks quinoa (“an Andean chenopod”) for the unnamed Occupy protester, he muses on the left-theoretical notion of “briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic - your bathroom - into the commons.” Does this ironic tone (which often feels like a reflex, a tic) preclude sincerity? Is all this talk of community no more than an artful confection, the purest kind of cynicism? The question is impossible to resolve, so each of these episodes - and indeed the book as a whole - takes on a sort of hermetic undecidability. At the Met he connects the painting to “Back to the Future,” a “crucial movie of my youth.” He and the 8-year-old plan “to self-publish” a book about dinosaurs. The word’s very clunkiness seems to indicate sincerity, but in each case the narrator’s apparently committed attempt to think through a moment of community - sharing an experience of art, playing with a child, giving hospitality to a stranger - is thrown into question by a detectable note of archness.
Lerner uses the strikingly unlovely word “coconstructed” to describe the shared nature of their experience: “We would work out our views as we coconstructed the literal view before us.” A few paragraphs on, he and an 8-year-old boy are seen “coconstructing a shoe-box diorama.” Later he can be found letting an Occupy protester shower in his apartment, wondering if it’s possible to “coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.” Early in “10:04,” Ben Lerner’s frequently brilliant second novel, the central character - a refraction or avatar of this Brooklyn-based author - describes visiting the Metropolitan Museum with a female friend: “We often visited weekday afternoons, since Alex was unemployed, and I, a writer.” Together they look at a melodramatic 19th-century genre painting of Joan of Arc, which the narrator claims is one of his favorite pictures.
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