In Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the narrator is a distinctive character. He is clearly very educated and aware of the social, political, and economic conditions of his time. He notices the bigger ideas and problems behind the most subtle actions. The consequence of being this aware is that it becomes exhausting on the mind.

Part III begins with an unusual scene at the New York Presbyterian Hospital. As he describes it – “Bank, medical office, pornographic theater – it was a supra-institution” (p88 on kindle). It was definetly the most bizarre method of sperm collection in a medical professional sense I have ever scene. He became very anxious thinking about the many ways he could contaminate the sample, the morality behind showing preference to a particular movie since they were sorted by ethnicity, confronting Alex if he were to back out, and if he was prepared to be a donor or a father. This awareness is the overthinking that comes with anxiety.

It then moves on to a scene I found very entertaining of a conversation he may have with the future child that comes from this donation. He presents himself with all these questions the child might ask on their origins but the questions get increasingly uncanny and become an interrogration from his subconcious. He began to comtemplate the costs involved, possible names, why they didn’t use other options instead of IVF, his artistic choices, the morality of this decision, and problems he may run into with the child. The cut from the interrogation to him saying “I hoped my sperm was useless” (p94 on kindle) and then returning to this made-up conversation was amusing and stood out. Although this awareness of all these questions and problems he may run into in the future are also formed out of his anxieties, It is a dissociation into a future that has not happened yet that obviously exhausted him to the point of saying he hopes his sperm is useless. The narrator plays with this conception of time alot and travels to these other timelines often because of his awareness of the possibilities he may run into as a result of his actions.

Another interesting plot point where this occurs is his conversation with his coworker Noor and her origins. She tells this story as context to why she is estranged to her Lebanese family. Being that it was revealed to her that her father was not her biological father and she is not actually Lebanese. Making her feel seperate from the sense of identity she had formed over the course of her life. As if her “whole life up until that point that had happened but never occured” because it is not ‘true’. I found this seperation of self to be super interesting because it was a result of becoming aware that did not come from the narrator. The narrator is constantly in a state between being present and dissociating to a different timeline because he makes himself aware of all these different things. Noor became aware that her father was not her biological father and so the culture and passions she grew up with, the meanings behind her actions, no longer feel real and true. So, the dissocation that comes from awareness also comes with this seperation from one’s identity.

Despite 10:04 being a novel, which makes it fiction, the story is written in such a way that it seems like it could be non-fiction. The novel does this by making the events in the story very ordinary and relatable. It starts off with our main character who has a real heart disease, Marfan. As the story goes on, we see popular places that exist in New York appear in the story, such as the High Line, Prospect Park, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To further solidify the feeling of the story being nonfiction, we see references to real life events that happened, with the first being 9/11. “‘When all the skyscrapers freeze they’re going to fall down like September eleventh,.’ he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, ‘and crush everyone’ (12). Shortly after that they mentioned global warming and Kony 2012 which kind of startled me because of how recent these events were. I then found out that this book was published in 2014 and then the reality started to hit. It has been nearly a decade since this book was published and there was has been little to no change in our fight against climate change which has started a long time ago. In fact majority of the events in the story seem like they could have happened today or tomorrow which is kind of scary knowing that it’s been many years since we knew of our approaching demise, yet we have not changed at all. As we go deeper and deeper it all the experiences within the story remind me of more recent experiences that we have had. On page 16 where it talks about shutting down the subway system because of a storm, it reminded me of September 29th when there was huge rainfall and caused the entire subway system to shut down. A couple of pages later on page 18 they mention people panic buying and there not being enough stock of certain items for everyone. All of these scenarios that are shown in the story could be seen as predictions of the future if we didn’t change anything about our climate. Unfortunately it seems that we have not changed at all which makes this story all the more relatable as some of these events in the story are so similar to what we have went through that it feels like the novel has predicted everything. In chapter 2, we find out that there is an author that is also trying to write a novel. This is where it started to feel like an autobiography, and that 10:04 is possibly based off of Ben Lerner’s own experiences living in New York. That would help explain the use of very specific locations that exist in our world and also further gives the feeling of familiarity and no change, as someone who has lived in New York for majority of their lives would know and possibly visited these places and have yet to see any of them ever change from the way we know them.

Did you know that the narrator eats octopus again? If I had a nickel for every time the narrator eats octopus I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

The narrator uses his experiences and his friend’s experiences to create a fictional story. The narrator discusses the ideas he has for a novel. “A beautiful young half-Lebanese conceptual artist and sexual athlete committed to radical Arab politics is told by her mother, who is dying of breast cancer, that she’s been lied to about her paternity: her real father turns out to be a conservative professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. Or New Paltz. Wanting her own child, she selects a Lebanese sperm donor in an effort to project into the future the past she never had.” (157) The story feels too on the nose. The main character in the idea wants to have a child and choose someone to donate sperm or the mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. It all feels related to what has happened In the story.

It seems like the narrator can’t distinguish fiction from reality. His friend Alex is aware of this. He once believed his mother was dying when she wasn’t, he blamed the story that he was writing.”In my novel the protagonist tells people his mother is dead, when she’s alive and well. Halfway through writing the book, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I felt, however insanely, that the novel was in part responsible, that having even a fictionalized version of myself producing bad karma around parental health was in some unspecifiable way to blame for the diagnosis. I stopped working on the novel and was resolved to trash it until my mom who was doing perfectly well after a mastectomy and who, thankfully, hadn’t had to do chemo convinced me over the course of a couple of months to finish the book.” (138) He lives in this fictional reality. He believes that whatever he writes about it, whatever he may picture, it could happen. Fiction has consumed the narrator’s life. It’s his reality. the same reality, but different. It seemed like if he continued to write the book, his mom would have suffered. Do you think there’s another me out there, and another you? Living the same lives but different? And they’re writing about us? This hurts my brain, I’m having an existential crisis.

“Because you believe, even though you’ll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you’re probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.” (138)

It’s fiction, it’s not real. If something never happened, it’s fiction. Even if it seems real? A hallucination? Is this fiction within fiction? Honestly, I’m not sure if I understand the book entirely. I have more questions/guesses than analyzing. But let’s think about the octopus again. An octopus represents creativity, intelligence, and awareness, it can adapt to different situations. It’s a multitasker. Kind of like the narrator. I guess we’re all like octopuses in some way.

    As I read 10:04: A Novel, I was surprised that the perspective shifted back to Lerner instead of the character “The author”. I originally assumed that the first few chapters where Lerner reminisces and writes about his life was a sort of cold open that would segway into the fiction part of this auto-fiction novel. The rest of his life would be told through the filter of the “The author”, paralleling his real life and making it clear by alluding to the actual people described in the first two chapters with their fictional counterparts. This was not the case, and after reading this chapter I am thankful for that. As much as I poke fun at the book itself for appearing to fall into the oversaturated genre of autobiography that no one asked for, written by someone with a decent enough popularity in their little niche, this chapter did pique my interest after a second read. In it, Lerner and his agent discuss his book and why anyone would pay a large sum ahead of time for an unfinished novel. As his agent tries to put it as gently as possible, the proposal might be worth more than the book itself due to the prestige of his name and the popularity of his last book. As for why, Lerner explains it best;

    “This I understood, or at least recognized, from experience: most desire was imitative desire. If one university wanted to buy your papers, another university would want to buy them, too—consensus emerges regarding your importance. Competition produces its own object of desire; that’s why it makes sense to speak of a “competitive spirit,” a creative deity” (Lerner, Ben. “Three.” 10:04, p. 121) 

    Reputation and quantity over actual quality in the publishing world is something I’ve only been made aware of recently due to the rise of Booktok, a subcommunity in Tiktok. It’s a more modern phenomenon centered around feeding an algorithm, authors churning out novel after novel to keep their name circulating. My mind is currently drawing a blank at his name, I think his initials are JN but I could be wrong, but there currently is an author that falls heavily into this that has become rather infamous. From what I’ve read, many people who work in bookstores consider him a plague for his quantity-over-quality approach to writing. He isn’t hated just for the content of his works, but for the overabundance of it made in such a short time. While there is a section of people who do hate him there is an even larger majority that love his work and keep him a popular author. The man publishes faster than these stores and staff can keep up with yet people clamor for them and are upset when they run out just as quickly as they are made. This leads to many shipments for these stores consisting mainly of his works and taking up space that could’ve been used to promote fresh faces, people of color, and authors of other marginalized identities. Knowing this the practice feels so insidious, favoring those who are fast with big names at the very top of the industry while smaller authors have to rely on social media and word of mouth to compete.

Ben Lerner’s novel “10:04”, is definitely not an easy read. I find it difficult to get into the flow of the novel, and whatever was happening in the novel wasn’t really sticking with me. It’s terribly confusing to read, and the pictures (in my opinion) weren’t helping much. I’m not much of a reader in general, and if I don’t like something I’m quick to put it down and never touch it again… However, I don’t have a choice but to read this book, so here I am. 

Even though I’m from New York, I’m not really from New York (to put it simply, I’m from Staten Island), so whatever NYC-esque thing that is being talked about or whatever location is said, I have absolutely no idea what the narrator is talking about. I’m being serious. My NYC lifestyle consists of me traveling 1hr and a half by bus twice a week from Staten Island to Manhattan, staying within the area of Hunter College (Midtown), and then traveling back home for another ~2 hours. So I don’t know anything about a “High-Line” or “Chelsea”, which already makes this book unrelatable to me. Though, the narrator (who is actually the author of the novel) also spoke briefly all the way in the beginning about eating “outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death.” (Lerner, 3?) Which, again, is unrelatable. However, the relatability of this novel is unimportant right now.

From what I’ve gotten from this novel, this novel is about “time”. I say this because Ben brings it up a few times in the beginning of the novel (first chapter), to make us understand the importance of time and its prevalence within the novel. We also discover that the narrator has a chronic heart illness that could result in death. I feel like that fact that the two concepts (time and his illness) were mentioned so soon probably means that the author wants us to be able to connect some dots–maybe along the lines of the narrator feeling the pressure of time, not knowing how long he may have left, but regardless, still wanting to focus on writing his novel. The novel makes references to “Back to the Future”, and even has a moment between Ben and Alex that makes us think about time as well, when Alex talks about getting pregnant with his child and Ben thinking about fatherhood. In the essence of time, will Ben even survive long enough to experience fatherhood?