'A Near-Perfect Piece of Literature:' Maggie Nelson Reviews Ben Lerner at Los Angeles Review of Books

Los Angeles Review of Books presents two writers who work across the boundaries of poetry, prose, and scholarship: Maggie Nelson and her fabulous review of Ben Lerner's new book: 10:04.

BUT OF COURSE every generation has its own version, its own smoldering apprehension of end times, of the foreclosure of human history, the cessation of our capacity to inhabit this beautiful earth. But who (besides the increasingly obdurate and immoral climate deniers) can truly ignore the strange pocket of space-time we currently inhabit, in which a grievous threat to our habitat is not only assured, but also underway? Who knows what to do when that demise is underway, but not necessarily imminent? As Spanish philosopher Beatriz Preciado puts it: “The problem resides precisely in the fact that no one will come to save us and that we are still some distance from our inevitable disappearance. It will thus be necessary to think about doing something while we are on the way out.”

One of the things we can do, for better or worse, is make art. Whether or not this art takes the above predicament as its principal subject may not, in the long run, matter; in retrospect (should we be so lucky), almost all the art we are creating now will likely appear suffused — if not to say gaslit — by the slow-burning anxiety created by the deepening climate crisis, and the wealth gap that is its intimate companion. Ben Lerner’s 10:04 sets up shop in the eye of this anxiety. At 240 pages, his new novel does not announce itself as a magnum opus. But given Lerner’s considerable humor, rigorous intelligence, and shrewd breed of conscience — his bighearted spirit and formal achievement — it is. A generous, provocative, ambitious Chinese box of a novel, 10:04 is a near-perfect piece of literature, affirmative of both life and art, written with the full force of Lerner’s intellectual, aesthetic, and empathetic powers, which are as considerable as they are vitalizing. [...]

Learn more from Maggie Nelson about Lerner's new book at Los Angeles Review of Books.