By Ben Lerner
Granta, £14.99
At one level, 10:04 is a New York lifestyle novel in a tradition of Scott Fitzgerald or Jay McInerney, but with less linear form, wider frame of reference and a more individual voice.
Constructed of discrete slices of life and digressive set-pieces, it has as a main theme perception and its distortions, as brought on by medical or dietary conditions, neurological or communal atmospheres and their subtle shifts.
The narrator has had an essay printed in The New Yorker, which enables a go-getting agent to land him a six-figure advance for a novel. That the work we are reading is the very one commissioned is hinted at by his asides that his ideal of fiction is experience in the slimmest disguises. Repeats and returns over same or similar ground make us wonder: are these exercises in technique, virtuoso displays of narrative strategies by yet another prize-touted instructor in one of America's numberless creative writing schools?
Should we worry about content? Isn't this about a middle-class chap with not much of a life groping for material on which to deploy his unarguable talent for words?
If you care about his type, the answer is no. The thread of plot involves a 33-year-old just diagnosed with a heart condition being asked by his best friend to father her baby at the same time as he is offered that six-figure sum.
Relationship issues, a modern religion of health-care, mundane questions of being culturally correct in trendy Brooklyn are all raised. Occasionally we spot a flicker of Bonfire of the Vanities, but characters are rarely dispatched with facile satire; genuine desire to discern moral pattern lurks beyond the superficial.
Vignettes link in an episodic form recalling also the young Woody Allen, but amid the neurosis there is little straining for jokes.
The author's world can be narrow, but it is never unkind. Deficiencies in ethics belong to him as much as to others and are inspected with such care as to open on to larger insights.
Does all this cohere? This might be a critical question were the writer's object not so clearly to reflect multiplicity of experience in the collective - New York and not nature; one person among many; not some stark individual against wild outer spaces, or God.
Four-fifths of the way through the book, the narrator goes to an artist's retreat in Texas where, subsidised by a grant, he can get on with his work. New York eyes are exposed to Whitman-esque vistas of a more inclusive American reality, reaching its euphoric, then scary climax at a party where too many drugs are taken. Opening-out of perspective and distortion of perception having met nemesis, the narrator is soon back in New York and the wonders and worries he began with.
If this sounds banal, it is not quite. The compulsion and occasional fraudulence of what has been commissioned may mask an achievement that is authentically "one from the heart".
Stoddard Martin is a writer, critic and publisher
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