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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means". Inigo Montoya (Princess Bride)

10:04 would make a great end-of-term paper for a certain type of creative writing course.

It would score full marks for showing the writer's ability to use a thesaurus. The golden rules of this novel are to never say pigeon when you can wittily refer to "stout-bodied passerines" (your wit is shown all the more by doing this several times in the book), never say "it was foggy but not snowing" when you can say "except now the material form of excitation wasn't ice, the air was heavy with water in its gas phase.". A character, must drink a "high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phopshoric acid and E150d", never coke, not cry but have "lacrimal events". Neither may he sweat, rather he must have "urea and salt emerging from his underarms" (again used more than once); particularly when they meet an attractive woman, except that has to be one who's figure is "consistent with normative male fantasy", and she must be coeval not merely of a similar age to him (used it feels almost every page - Lerner's particularly fond of that word). And that may in turn lead to the character "deploying my hands Onanistically". Hopefully the last needs no translation, although Lerner's intended meaning isn't even biblically accurate of course, and he/the narrator also admits that pigeons aren't actually passerines; hence the words of Inigo Montaya to Vizzini, another person convinced of his own wit.

Lerner could possibly be an amusing and stimulating dinner party guest, although he probably wouldn't get a second invite, but by no stretch of the imagination is this great literature.

The fact that the book comes with blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, writers of two of the very worst novels I've read in the last 15 years, and that the author seems overly fond of things like the Occupy movement should have warned me that this would be self-indulgence of the worst kind.

Even the story is self-indulgent - the narrator is (like Lerner), author of a critically acclaimed first novel, and, on the strength of a New Yorker story (included verbatim) receives a big advance for his second novel. And the narrator decides to write his novel about writing his novel, which is of course the novel we're reading. How much of the narrator's story is really Lerner's I'm not sure, and indeed don't care, but it adds to the self-satisfied feel. The story is then padded out with descriptions of the experience of taking recreational drugs, one of the most tedious forms of literature, and descriptions of others works of art, which sound a lot more interesting that the novel we're reading.

There is one glimmer of hope. The narrator's agent tells him that "there are risks to taking a big advance - because if the book doesn't sell at all, nobody's going to want to work with you again.". If true, let's hope 10:04 doesn't sell (I borrowed mine from the library which hopefully doesn't count to earning his advance).