His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), is a comedy in which Adam Gordon, a Ben Lerner-like young American poet living in Madrid, stumbles through a sequence of downbeat encounters, habitually lying in an attempt to make himself more interesting or desirable, and being socially and emotionally throttled by his own self-consciousness. As a description of 10:04 this works fine, but it’s even better when applied to Lerner’s fiction writing as a whole, which was always big-brained, but is now big-hearted as well. At the beginning of Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, the narrator, Ben, tells his agent over a lunch of baby squid (“We were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene”) that he is going to write a novel in which “I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity”.
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