Writing this year about My Struggle, the vast autobiographical novel by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner suggested that its central question might be ‘the problem of form rising from formlessness, of how to bring order to the undifferentiated mass of experience, and the relation of that problem to death’. Reading 10:04, Lerner’s second novel, you can see why the idea appealed to him so much. This restive, rambling, neurotic piece of work – occasionally illuminating, very often trying – is not exactly a response to Knausgaard’s exhaustive act of ‘literary suicide’, but it proceeds from similar agonies and frustrations. What is the novel for? How much rearrangement does it take to turn memoir into fiction? Isn’t it dishonest to reach for the conventional satisfactions of plot? And what is honesty anyway in a form this artificial?

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