10:04 - Ben Lerner

Lerner is one of those popular current writers that I’ve never gotten around to reading. I remember being in college and his poetry and first book being popular. I remember this volume coming out and people really enjoying it. I remember his most recent book from a year or two ago that also got a surprising amount of buzz for a novel. Plus, I believe he taught beloved contemporary poet/novelist Ocean Vugon. What I did not know is that this, and apparently all of his work, is autofiction, which, especially if we include straightforward memoir, is the literary mode of the day. Why is this? Why are so few people interested in actual novels where the action and characters are made-up? Even anecdotal, everyone I know who has written or is writing a book is writing a memoir or a slightly fictionalized version of their own life. This is very strange to me, especially when the person writing it is someone like Lerner, who doesn’t live a particularly interesting life. He’s a successful poet and author so his life is teaching poetry, and going to artist residencies and wandering around NYC doing rich, artsy guy things like diners and gallery openings. Tao Lin is similar in this regard but Tao at least has managed to go insane and suffuse his books with his esoteric beliefs and drug-fueled lifestyle. Lerner does do Ketamine by accident at one point in this book but otherwise he’s a very square guy. He lets a guy who’s going to Occupy crash at his fancy Brooklyn apartment for a day or two but doesn’t go to the protests himself. He tutors a child of undocumented immigrants but just buys the kid stuff when he’s having trouble keeping him on track. He’s asked by his aging female friend to donate sperm so she can have a child though she doesn't necessarily want him involved. He sort of just floats through life in this privileged bubble; he often reminds us that he was paid something in the high 6-figures for this book, since the process of deciding to write, then selling, then changing the ideas for the book we are reading is a big through line of the book. As are his friends asking him if what they’re doing is going to end up in the novel, or saying they don’t want to be in the novel or telling Lerner he sounds like he’s in the novel. I will say it is very well written. I read it in about a day and many of the individual sentences were well crafted and the book moved pleasantly for something in which very little happens. I can tell that he’s a poet. I assume now that his books are popular because they’re reviewed and read by people who are also in the book publishing/author world and are able to deeply relate to what Lerner is talking about. I’m not in that world, so its depiction struck me as shallow and unpleasant, which I don’t think was the intent. It is very strange to me that people would want autofiction from a person that lives such a boring life. 1004 expensive dinners.