10:04 Literary Elements

Contemporary fiction, metafiction

Modern-day New York City

The novel is from the first-person point of view of an unnamed narrator who may or may not represent Lerner himself.

Objective, intelligent, impersonal

Protagonist: the unnamed narrator, who struggles with writing his novel and balancing his social life and health problems. Antagonist: none in particular except the inscrutabilities of the modern world and the narrator's writing block.

The narrator's novel-in-progress is struggling, so he must find a way to improve and make progress in order to make a living. He also discovers that he has a dangerous heart condition, and that his girlfriend doesn't love him, and that his best friend wants to have his baby, so he has to deal with all of that as well.

The novel climaxes with the narrator finally impregnating Alex, his best friend, and it ends with the two of them strolling along a street in New York City and musing upon life.

“I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously,” I should have said, “a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.” (Part I)

This quote foreshadows the structure of the rest of the novel.

“In either case, I was now burdened with the awareness that there was a statistically significant chance the largest artery in my body would rupture at any moment.” (Part I)

The novel references the movie Back to the Future several times, a movie from which the novel derives its title. The movie's theme of time travel also mirrors the novel's playing with time, which makes Back to the Future's time travel look like basic subtraction.

One of the major themes of this book is the possibility of separate, simultaneously existent realities. Many quotes go along with this theme, especially the one that could be considered the novel's thesis statement: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously, a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.” This sort of reality-shifting imagery is prevalent throughout the book as the narrator seems to shift realities as the story progress (and regresses, and everything in between).

The narrator is in love with Alex, his female best friend, but she doesn't love him back - at least, not romantically. She does, however, want to have his baby, since she has still not gotten pregnant and is currently single. This creates a cruel paradox for the narrator, who has the opportunity to become co-parents with the woman he loves, but he knows she will never love him romantically.

The main character in the narrator's short story "The Golden Vanity" parallels the narrator's own life almost perfectly, down to his own version of Alex (Liza) and his own version of Alena (Hannah). This parallelism might also imply that the narrator's life parallels that of Ben Lerner, the author, making this work even more semi-autobiographical.

“... running a hand along the construction paper autumnalia: foliage changing its Crayola" (Part I)

“It’s as if the tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of temporality, produces a glitch in the pictorial matrix; the background swallows her fingers” (Part I)