![]() ![]() Some were watching Friends or Frasier, some were watching SportsCenter. Where were the parents? Most were sleeping. In 10:04, there’s a scene where Ben feels a twinge of guilt for eating an octopus it almost made me a vegan. However specific his protagonists are, the reader can almost inhabit them. He’s a beautiful stylist and an erudite companion (conversant in John Ashbery, Hermann Hesse, old master paintings, Tupac Shakur, catholic interests shared by almost every straight boy I knew in college). Lerner is a careful student of how people behave, and brilliant at conjuring the verisimilitude of actual thought. 10:04 has the makings of an exercise in self-obsession-the equivalent of a famous pop star singing about the difficulties of being a famous pop star-but it’s superb. At its worst, this kind of fiction, the writer Hari Kunzru has observed, can “degenerate into something like an artfully curated social media feed,” lapsing into solipsism and betraying a lack of imagination. ![]() A young poet knocks around Madrid and acts like kind of a jerk a young novelist knocks around New York and tries his best not to be a jerk. When summarized, these two books don’t sound like much. ![]() THE TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $27.00 ![]()
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