Fact, fiction or farce? The American comic novel is becoming increasingly hard to define

The American comic novel is going through an odd phase. Just lately it seems like anything funny must sneak in behind an abstruse metafictional edifice, deployed, I suspect, by insecure authors who want to retain their jobs as teachers of creative writing. 10:04, Ben Lerner’s lopsided but often electric second novel, is the latest example of the comic genre via subterfuge, sprinkled with tricks and played so deadpan you might not know when
to laugh.

The narrator, who shares a first name with the author, is a resident of a New York City that is battered by storms, vulnerable to hurricanes and hipsters. He has health concerns which require regular hospital visits: first he has a dilated aorta which he thinks could rupture at any moment; second he is planning to donate sperm so that his best friend can have a baby, although he has some doubts about the quality of his essence. He is also a successful writer, with an acclaimed debut novel to his credit and a recently published short story in the New Yorker. It might be important to note here that Lerner himself had an acclaimed first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and afterwards published a story in the New Yorker (republished in full in this novel, but presented as the narrator’s story).

This is only the beginning of what could be called, depending on the reader’s temperament, either fruitful mischief or wanton reflexivity. Ben is working on a second novel — ‘the book you’re reading now’ — which he describes as ‘neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them’.Obviously this is nothing new. Some of the most highly praised authors of the decade — from Sheila Heti to Karl Ove Knausgaard — apply this method, unable to untether themselves from their own biographies.