![]() These disparate ingredients are held together by a set of overlapping motifs: the effect of commodity value on art terrified adults attempting to reassure children the transcendent emptying of assigned meanings and values. (The weather throughout the book is always “unseasonably warm,” a familiar unit of atmospheric description that becomes increasingly ominous.) The novel is bookended by two storms, Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy, catastrophes that are early warnings of the larger catastrophe of climate change. There’s also a first-rate comic set piece in which Ben has to masturbate into a cup at a fertility clinic, and the text of “The Golden Vanity,” which really did appear in The New Yorker, and which takes on an oddly potent double life as an artifact within the narrative and a work of art in its own right. Lerner takes art seriously, and he presents it as contiguous with the rest of life. 10:04 is larded with critical descriptions of works of art, along with other seemingly foreign matter: a lecture on Ronald Reagan’s eulogy for the Challenger astronauts, a fragment of a poem, a fabricated letter from the late poet William Bronk (a pastiche that will be appreciated by a rather limited audience). ![]()
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