Ben Lerner’s second novel opens with his narrator – like the author, a Brooklyn-based poet and novelist called Ben – enjoying an expensive lunch of baby octopuses “the chef had literally massaged to death” with his agent to celebrate the selling of his second novel for a six-figure advance.
Lerner’s masterclass in metafiction breaches the boundaries between fiction and real life, narrator and author, and even those between Lerner’s own writing projects: Ben reads like a slightly older and – dare I say it – wiser version of Adam, the narrator of Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, who was in Madrid on a poetry fellowship (again, like Lerner himself).
But despite first impressions, this is more than just another navel-gazing Brooklyn novel. It’s a clever, funny discourse on the processes of writing fiction, the end result “a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them”.
10:04 is published by Granta (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £5.99
