The protagonist describes his advance on the second page of the novel and then goes back in time to explain how he came to write the New Yorker story. Level C is the novel that the protagonist from level A, after publishing “The Golden Vanity,” begins writing but ultimately abandons: A novel in which an author-the one from level B-“tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters-mainly e-mails-from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library.”Įven when the narrative moves in a linear fashion it doesn’t feel linear.Īdding yet more intricacy, Lerner scrambles the chronology. Level B is that story, “ The Golden Vanity,” which appeared in the Jissue of The New Yorker, and which re-appears as the second chapter of 10:04. In the midst of all this, the protagonist decides to write a story involving “a series of transpositions.” He’ll shift his medical problem to another part of his body and call Alex “Liza.” Instead of becoming a literary executor, he’ll be approached by a university about selling his papers. On what I’ll call fiction level A, the narrator-protagonist has been diagnosed with a heart condition and considers impregnating his platonic best friend, Alex, not “in copula, but rather through intrauterine insemination.” (In the funniest scene in the novel, the protagonist compulsively rewashes his hands, scared of contaminating the sample, before masturbating into a plastic container.) Meanwhile his ailing mentor, Bernard, has named him his literary executor. Escher drawing, as Lerner jumps from one fictional level to the next.

While in Marfa he decides “to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that … is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them.” That “flickering” makes the novel feel structurally unstable, like the textual equivalent of an M.C. He promises his agent that he’ll work on expanding the story into a novel during an artist’s residency in Marfa, Texas. A poet from Kansas who published a successful first novel, the narrator-protagonist receives a six-figure advance for a second novel on the strength of a story that ran in The New Yorker.

Ben lerner atocha