I feel like I need to apologize to Mr Lerner because despite the gushing plaudits he has received for his work I have never read his books. (His response to my apology would be: "Who are you?") He's apparently my neighbor. I've walked the same Brooklyn routes he/the protagonist walks trying to articulate my cosmic ache, but without the giant grasp of vocabulary like I am a living OED. 10:04 is cohesive and meandering at the same time, like listening to a really smart boyfriend who you are attracted to so its OK that he talks about his literary success. Most readers will also want him to be your Winter Brooklyn BF because he seems loyal, horny, attentive to your pleasure but also sexually selfish in a good way, and great at post coital conversation. I have to say i went in with a bad attitude because of the blurbs. Is there such a thing as over-blurbing a book? Quotes from every outlet saying this an instant classic but also reinvents literature. You start reading with a layer of judgement like you are a spoiled contestant on Love Island wrinkling your nose at all the perfect pecs presented. Nonetheless, his descriptions are breathtaking and he expertly brings you to climax. Favorite moments: when he accidentally does Special K in Marfa and then hungover writes a poem with the line "the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, shuttling between the you and I." Also visiting his lover's Institute of Totaled Art and holding shattered pieces of a Jeff Koon's balloon dog and seeing "the hollow interior of a work of willful superficiality," "an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity shattered." And on one of his (and mine, and all of our) moping city walks, his description of "the small thrill" looking at Manhattan, "that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale..." A list of words he uses to try and throw into casual convo: mycloclonic twitch, hectocotylus, craquelure, premicturition, coeval, pareidolia, passerines, parasuicidal, proprioceptive, chtonic, cladogram, postcodex, retablo, insuffulated, caissons, haruspicy, intrathoracic, tentacular, and submarine as an adjective.