The hero of his lauded debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), is an artist with a critic’s mind: a young poet who believes he is a fraud, and finds lines of poetry most moving when quoted in essays, where they no longer exist as poetry as such, but as re-contextualized “echo[es] of poetic possibility.” The unnamed narrator of Lerner’s new novel, 10:04, is also academic in his thinking and even, like Lerner himself, a working art critic. This novel, however, is even more academic and self-reflexive than the last one. It is a book that claims to recount the time of its own writing, and frequently blurs the lines between fiction, memoir, and criticism in the process.