Author Ben Lerner muses about the future in acclaimed new novel ’10:04′

TORONTO – The name of Ben Lerner’s much-praised new novel “10:04” comes from the classic ’80s flick “Back to the Future,” a “crucial movie” of the author’s youth.

“It formed a really important part of my psychology as a kid,” the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Lerner said in a recent interview. “It actually contains … this disturbing story about having to go back in time and, like, hook your parents up … this Oedipal drama for the kids of the ’80s, where they had to imagine their parents having sex for the first time, this Greek existential thing.

“And then also, one thing that really had a lasting impact on me and I mention it in the book … (Ronald) Reagan was the president … and the movie made fun of how Reagan had been an actor. There’s this scene where Michael J. Fox is trying to convince Christopher Lloyd that he’s from the future and he says: ‘Well who’s president in the ’80s?’ And he says: ‘Ronald Reagan.’ And then he says something like: ‘That actor? Like, who’s vice-president? Jerry Lewis?’ It was the first moment where I realized that politicians were actors and actors were politicians.”

Lerner’s title is drawn from the climactic scene in the 1985 crowd-pleaser when lightning strikes the clock tower and Marty McFly (Fox) is able to return from 1955 to the present. Christian Marclay used that “Back to the Future” instant in his art installation “The Clock,” which features prominently in “10:04.”

“10:04 is the moment where Michael J. Fox actually gets ‘back to the future,” said Lerner, who has also written several books of poetry. “(My novel) is a book a lot about time and also about the relationships between art and life, and (the title) seemed to gather a lot of the book’s concerns.”

The follow-up to Lerner’s critically lauded debut novel “Leaving the Atocha Station,” “10:04” is narrated by an unnamed Brooklyn-based novelist/poet who is working on his second novel and is asked by a friend to father her child. He’s also grappling with a disturbing medical diagnosis, as hurricanes threaten to upend the city.

If the book’s “speaker” bears a passing resemblance to Lerner, it’s no coincidence. One critic has described “10:04” as a “semi-memoir.”

Explains the author: “It’s a not a memoir, really, I mean it uses material from my life and it invites the confusion between what’s fact and fiction…. Part of what the book is really about is the shifting boundary between fact and fiction, and how that’s a porous boundary, not an impermeable wall. The book goes out of its way to kind of confuse what’s real and what isn’t. But it is really fiction, that is to say … a lot of the events I haven’t experienced.”

Lerner says he reads constantly as he writes, using the “infinite archive” of the Internet to research fragments of his books, like the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which he references in “10:04.”

“You can go back and read, like, the curriculum for teachers and the space program and the transcripts of Reagan’s political speeches,” Lerner said of his experiences trolling the World Wide Web. “(The poet) Wallace Stevens had a sentence about writing just being an intense form of reading and I kind of feel that way. Sometimes I can’t even tell the difference between writing and reading.”

Lerner says that while many people view fiction as a place to escape reality, in “10:04” he’s interested in exploring how we “live fiction.”

“The future is always a fiction, it’s always a story we’re telling,” said Lerner. “I’m really interested in how our experience of the present changes based upon the stories we’re telling ourselves about the future. So fiction, for me, it’s not so much about what’s true or false in my life, it’s more about trying to make the book a place where we think about how fictions are lived.”