10:04 by Ben Lerner review – a masterclass in metafiction

Lerner’s clever second novel blurs the divide between fiction and real life

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).

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