The roaming cadence and garrulous elegance of the book, which goes off at tangents like a verbose firework, sucked me in to the extent that I was happy to simply spend time in the head of this “character.” 10:04 is a kind of memoir, or autobiographical novel, about an incessantly interrogative intellectual Brooklyn writer as he attempts to make digressive, timeline-hopping sense of his life, which is that of Ben Lerner, to a degree, or should I say “Ben Lerner.” He the author of the not-dissimilar Leaving the Atocha Station (which a friend of mine lazily and cruelly refers to as Leaving the Atrocious Station), which I liked quite a lot.
I loved it, and was sad to finish the novel. I can imagine some extremely well-read and tolerant folks I know flinging this across the room long before they get near page 50. If that excerpt bothers you, forget about 10:04 (2014). We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely. We walked south among the dimly gleaming disused rails and carefully placed stands of sumac and smoke bush until we reached that part of the High Line where a cut has been made into the deck and wooden steps descend several layers below the structure the lowest level is fitted with upright windows overlooking Tenth Avenue to form a kind of amphitheatre where you can sit and watch the traffic. We had ingested the impossibly tender things entire, the first intact head I had ever consumed, let alone of an animal that decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play. The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.
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