The unnamed narrator is a poet whose previous novel was unexpectedly successful he shares the anxieties and self-loathing of said previous novel's narrator and so on. Much of the same will be said about 10:04. The narrator was, like Lerner, an American poet from Topeka on a prestigious fellowship in Spain, and the book felt deeply, painfully experienced. (There were also, thrillingly, small glimpses at what would become the major themes and symbols of 10:04: 'unseasonably' warm or cool weather rising sea levels alienation from the familiar, and from oneself 'Everything was a little changed, a little charged.') Published by a small press in 2011, Leaving the Atocha Station was a surprise critical smash, and much was said about its apparently autobiographical nature. Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, also employed such refrains the most crucial was 'a profound experience of art,' or, more precisely, the narrator's inability to have one. 'Everything will be as it is now,' the leitmotif goes, 'just a little different.'

Everything is 'unusual' – Whole Foods shoppers are 'unusually polite' as an 'unusually large cyclonic system' approaches the city – and reality is constantly 'flickering.' The book's epigraph tells of a Hasidic story in which 'the world to come' is almost identical to our own, but not quite. The planet rearranges itself more literally, too, growing hotter and menacing New York with apocalyptic storms.

In 10:04, Ben Lerner's beautiful new novel, it is always 'unseasonably warm.' The world 'rearranges itself' – around the narrator, when a mentor falls ill around a woman who learns her father is not her biological parent.

10 04 ben lerner summary