He went on the internet, where he learned that the cephalopod’s neurons are evenly distributed, and that as a result the octopus can taste anything it touches. When I first met him in Brooklyn earlier this summer, he and his wife, Ariana Mangual, a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, were … The vain attempts of America’s middle-class liberals to put their “first‑world problems” into context and acknowledge their disproportionate share of the world’s limited resources have been highly satirised in recent fiction, where Jonathan Franzen’s Walter Berglund (in Freedom) can be read as the literary heir to Charles Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby. Ben Lerner is a novelist, poet, and critic exploring the relevance of art and the artist to modern culture with humor, compassion, and intelligence. By Cressida Leysho n. May 20, 2019. He reflects on certain cultural totems of his childhood in the 1980s: the explosion of the Challenger spaceship, which killed seven astronauts; the movie Back to the Future; and how Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter, introduced the budding poet to his first inklings of rhyme and metre. Lerner himself has been married for eight years. Some years ago, after eating one at a Japanese restaurant, the poet and novelist Ben Lerner became interested in the sensory life of the octopus. Whenever I’m lucky enough to hang out with Ben I wish it could go on for infinity. “It’s really weird to have these figures of post-apartheid, post-racial America and then have this man in front of this peeling mural and not know if history was happening or going backwards.” He adds, of the artist: “But I don’t know what she was setting out to do.”. He and his friends wait to experience something “real” to write about. The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner’s characters both enjoy their access to obscure consumer goods and resort to living on unemployment cheques. [15] The Topeka School was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I met Lerner at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on a rainy afternoon in early December. In a park and a basketball court, black men and boys walk or run or play on paved suraces. In one shot, a man strolls back and forth in front of a mural of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. Can he do good in the world, or do all of his attempts to assert political will devolve into banal consumer choices? But Lerner is interested in what agency is actually available to his characters to address the great problems of the world, what he calls “modes of care”. Last modified on Tue 13 Oct 2020 08.50 EDT. N ear the beginning of Ben Lerner’s third novel, a teenager named Adam Gordon creeps into what he thinks is his girlfriend’s house. Museums are frequent settings in Lerner’s writing. The close platonic friendship between Alex and Ben has no precedent that I can think of in recent fiction, despite the prevalence of such relationships in the world around me. He began to put some of the ideas from his third book of poems and from an academic paper about John Ashbery into what he initially thought of as a first-person essay but later turned out to be Leaving the Atocha Station. By the time of its publication, when he was 32, he was already a successful poet, with three published collections, a nomination for the National Book Award for poetry, and a teaching job at Brooklyn College. Lerner’s 33-year-old narrator stands in front of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. [5] At Brown University he studied with poet C. D. Wright and earned a B.A. He wanders the bridges and parks of New York City, watches Christian Marclay’s film The Clock, and goes to the Met and the Museum of Natural History. He lives nearby and visits it often with his young daughter. In Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, the word appears many times. Lerner Was Married to Businessman, Billy Lerner. We sit in the museum and think about this. [2] Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016. His third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010. We watch in silence, then Lerner says he can’t help thinking about Eric Garner. In between storms, the narrator gets a book deal, tutors an eight-year-old immigrant from El Salvador, takes ketamine at a writing residency in Marfa, Texas, and navigates the donation of his sperm. Lerner himself has been married for eight years. Her name appears twice in 10:04, but she does not figure as a character. A frame started to grow around them, and that frame became 10:04. If humans can reinvent even basic facts of biology, what other seemingly immutable problems can be solved? But 10:04 only approaches such difficult problems through a detailed description of the “local texture variations” of New York City in the years between tropical storm Irene, in August 2011, and hurricane Sandy, in October 2013. Ben Lerner. It was a pescatory meal, heavy on the cocktails, terminating in ice cream: basil chip for me, salted caramel for Lerner. It shows different shots of East New York, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Afterwards, Lerner began work on a long poem. Billy Lerner, the son of parking mogul, Jack Lerner is best known for his new age parking system business, iPark, and his non-profit, Billy4Kids. [8], Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, published in 2011,[9] won the Believer Book Award[10] and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for first fiction and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize. He agrees. They await a collapse of their empire – expecting, either during a hurricane or Occupy Wall Street, a toppling of the social order – but somehow the moment never seems to arrive. Like Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 has an early scene in a museum. Ben Lerner on Adolescence and His Forthcoming Novel. “Insofar as I was interested in the arts I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf,” Adam says. The erstwhile Alex Latz married New York-based businessman and philanthropist, William “Billy” Lerner, in 1997. “You can write one novel in your life as a poet.”. He tends to enjoy poetry more when its lines are embedded in works of prose. Now, due to the time limitations of reproductive biology, such friends must confront the problem of producing a family outside the structure of a monogamous relationship. "[14] Giles Harvey, in The New York Times Magazine, called The Topeka School "the best book yet by the most talented writer of his generation." “The book wants to acknowledge all of that as an attempt to see what spaces for healing can exist, as opposed to the model of fiction that’s like ‘The way I deal with the political is that I pretend to have access to the mind of a nine-year-old boy in Sudan’ – instead of evading the material conditions of the book.”. Lerner began his writing career as a poet and essayist focused on contemporary literature and art. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. “I can see why, if I, the historical person, choose to write a book that’s set in Brooklyn and talks about book advances and eating bluefin tuna or whatever, that it’s just automatically in the category of the self-absorbed,” says Lerner. “I decided to write more fiction – something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do,” says the main character in his book. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. Despite the traditional structure of his own nuclear family (Mangual was pregnant with their daughter during much of the time he was writing the book), Lerner wanted 10:04 to address the expanded spectrum of domestic arrangements. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow, among other honors.

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