Ben Lerner, _10:04_

I ACTUALLY BOUGHT this about the time it came out, all the way back in 2014, but it took the publication of The Topeka School to get me to actually open it. I knew I wanted to read The Topeka School, having read a couple of chapters in periodicals, so I thought, well, really ought to get to this one first.

Why so reluctant? The main problem, I suspect, was that I enjoyed Leaving the Atocha Station so much that I anticipated disappointment.

I remember opening the shrink wrap on Reckoning, already feeling doomed, certain that I was never going to like it as much as Murmur. And I never did like it as much as Murmur, to tell the truth.

Reports of the plot of 10:04--that Lerner, a poet who had had unexpected and unlikely success with his first novel, had written a second novel about a poet who has unexpected and unlikely success with a first novel and is trying to figure out how to write a second--sounded like a one-way trip to a metafiction black hole. Wasn't sure I wanted to get lost in that particular funhouse again.

Well, guess what. 10:04 is delightful, a worthy successor to Atocha.

The title alludes to the hour at which lightning struck the city hall clock in Back to the Future, powering Marty McFly's return to the 1980s, and it is an appropriately off-handed, playful way of indicating the novel's most prominent theme, the mysterious likeness-but-non-identity of the future with the past.

The novel's epigraph summarizes a Hasidic tale about "the world to come" in which "everything will be as it is now, just a little different," and the concept of the same-but-subtly different returns often as the book progresses, sometimes comically, sometimes profoundly, sometimes both, and finally very movingly in its relevance to the unfolding of the narrator's relationship with Alex, his best friend at the novel's beginning and still his best friend at the end, but in a new, transformed key.

The book also inspired me to read William Bronk again, a poet I had (regrettably) not thought about much for thirty years or more now.

I started The Topeka School this afternoon. Why aren't our novelists writing novels this good?