Reading Note:
10:04
17 February 2015
Last week was a model week. Every day was devoted to its scheduled specialty. I won’t bore you with the details, but just tell you that the inevitable upshot was collapse: this week, I can barely tie my shoes. Starting off with a holiday didn’t help; nor did having Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil to dinner last night. They’d wanted to come on Sunday, which would have worked better for me as well, but Kathleen asked for and clearly needed at least one day of the weekend to be absolutely clear, and Monday was not a holiday for her outfit anyway.
I’m thinking of crawling back into bed and watching Gone Girl, which I haven’t seen. Never mind the schedule! The savage cold outdoors is so beastly that some sort of protest seems in order, even if protest will do me no good.
***
Over the weekend, I read 10:04. Finally. I’ll be interested to see how it ages. The writing is strong but mannered. I happen to like the manner very much, but I know how that can change. Ben Lerner’s manner is shaped, I should say, by his being a poet; he has a physiological understanding of English as she is spoke. I should say — but the poetry that Lerner includes in the novel is not as interesting as his prose, not by a long shot. And the strength of his prose is not drawn from sound. Does anyone remember a poetry textbook called Sound and Sense? (I have a copy here somewhere, although not the one I had in school.) Ben Lerner is a writer of sense, not sound. He is ferociously intelligent: he knows, I believe, as much as it is possible to learn in the few years that he has been with us (b 1979). The difficulty is that he doesn’t yet grasp how things fit together — for him. The overall tone is one of bemused exasperation. Lerner writes fluid, clear sentences studded with unusual words, such as “myoclonal,” which appears once, and “proprioceptive,” which shows up a lot without ever being explained. I don’t mean that we’re never told what “proprioceptive” means, but rather that Lerner never explains why it preoccupies him. Perhaps that is the message.
But really! I’m forgetting to mention that Lerner is very funny. I laughed and laughed. I laughed, it seems, even where I wasn’t meant to.
In the first chapter, or section, Lerner introduces us to the existential drama of being a poet who has written a successful first novel and whose best friend wants to impregnate herself with his sperm. (I’m assuming that everyone knows that Lerner’s fiction is “autobiographical,” and has gotten over that.) The flavor is nicely captured in the following paragraph.
While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person — I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so. I’d cooked with people plenty, usually acting as a dazzlingly incompetent sous chef for Alex or Jon or other friends or family. On various occasions I’d said to a woman I was interested in, “I would invite you to dinner, but I don’t cook,” at which point I would hope she’d say, “I’m a great cook,” so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything. Excepting the sandwiches I had made for Alex when she had mono — and even those I tended to buy and not prepare — I simply could not recall a single instance in which I had by myself constructed a meal, however rudimentary, for another human being. The closest memory I could summon was of scrambling eggs on Mother’s or Father’s Day as a child, but the uncelebrated parent, as well as my brother, always assisted me. Conversely, there was simply no end to the number of meals I could recall other people making for me, thousands upon thousands of meals, a quantity of food that would have to be measured in tons, dating from my mother’s milk to the present; just that week Aaron had roasted a chicken for our monthly dinner to catch up and discuss Roberto; Alena had made some kind of delicious trio of Middle Eastern salads the night before; in neither meal had I lent a hand, although I’d cursorily offered. Typically my contribution was just wine, itself the carefully aged work of others. Surely there were instances I was forgetting, but even assuming there were, they were exceedingly rare.
Unlike Lerner’s cooking skills, this is extremely capable, but it is also both “endearing” and “dazzling.” Throughout the passage, excess masquerades as scruple, climaxing in the absolutely uninformative reminder that wine is “the carefully aged work of others.”
Soon after this, watching an art-house movie, the narrator decides to write more fiction, “something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do.” He plans to write a story based a story, told by his college mentor, about the experience of a French writer who tried to raise some cash by publishing a collection of letters from famous correspondents that were, in fact, counterfeit, written by the author to himself. Scandal was averted when the collection was repurposed as a prize-winning epistolary novel. Lerner sends his amplification of all of this, embedded in a transliteration of his own experiences that shifts identities, off to The New Yorker, where it is accepted; only, the magazine wants him to cut the bit about the counterfeit letters. Indignant, he refuses to make changes, but when his agent and his friends persuade him that the magazine is right, he recants. Turn the page, and there’s the story, “The Golden Vanity.”
How I laughed, reading this. It was so awful! The very idea that The New Yorker would ever publish such tripe was every bit as funny as a New Yorker parody. What the story boiled down to was a denatured, almost sing-song replay of 10:04‘s first chapter. (I positively howled when “there was a small washer-and-dryer unit in a closet” was repeated; it had already had struck the note of ludicrous surplusage in the novel’s opening.) But the joke wore thin; I couldn’t wait to get to the end of “The Golden Vanity,” so that 10:04 could resume.
It was only after reading the novel that I learned that “The Golden Vanity” was published in The New Yorker. I quickly wised to the fact that the first chapter of 10:04 must have been composed in part deliberately to subvert and ridicule the story. This was a very different kind of funny.