With this, only his second full-length book of fiction - and those having been released across the short span of as many years - Lerner is, despite having three books of verse to his name, already more widely known as a novelist than a poet.
In many ways it’s a further examination of the ideas the author dealt with so deftly in his first book of narrative prose – those of poetry, relationships, time and the tenuous construction of the Self in the face of the super-thin membrane that separates it from reality and reality from itself in the wake of events – using the “I” as a weapon to explore its own fragility. It’s also the 13th day of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, being released in the UK to the same kind of near-univocal acclaim it received in the US. When I ask him what the atmosphere is like right now, whether it’s strange to see the city, under heavy police presence, in such a militarised state, he points out that even now it’s practically hands-off compared to policing in New York on any given day. It’s the 13th of January 2015 – six days after the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – and Lerner has flown in to London today from Paris. I meet Ben Lerner at Shoreditch’s branch of the Ace Hotel where, as I order our coffee and explain to the author of 2013’s Leaving the Atocha Station the difference between a latte and a flat white, the Brooklyn-resident poet and novelist finds himself locked out of his hotel room for no less than the third time in less than twenty-four hours.
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