10:04

The narrator, a Brooklyn-based poet and novelist who closely resembles the author Ben Lerner, lives in a New York City shaped by climate anxiety, economic precariousness, and the blurring of personal and political life. The novel follows approximately two years of his life as he contends with a potentially fatal cardiac condition, the prospect of fatherhood, and the challenge of writing the very book the reader holds.

The novel opens with the narrator walking the High Line, an elevated park on abandoned railway tracks in Manhattan, with his literary agent after a celebratory dinner. The agent has told him he can secure a large advance if he expands a story published in The New Yorker into a novel. The narrator reflects that the novel should "project myself into several futures simultaneously" and "work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city" (4). This opening scene is identified as the future beginning of the book itself, establishing its self-referential structure from the first pages.

The narrator recounts a medical evaluation at Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors discovered an asymptomatic dilation of his aortic root at 4.2 centimeters. The most common explanation at his age, 33, is Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder of connective tissue. If he has Marfan, the threshold for surgery is lower, and the risk of a "dissection," a usually fatal tearing of the aorta, is greater. His best friend, Alex, accompanies him to the appointment, sitting with a notebook to record the medical information he cannot retain.

Alex, whom the narrator has known since college and with whom he has shared six years of walks through Brooklyn, proposes that he donate sperm so she can conceive through intrauterine insemination (IUI). She is 36, single, and determined to have a child. Standing before a painting of Joan of Arc at the Metropolitan Museum, she tells him, "I know it's crazy and I want you to say yes" (9). The narrator notices Joan's hand dissolving where the metaphysical and physical worlds meet, comparing it to the fading photograph in Back to the Future, the 1985 film that recurs throughout the novel as a touchstone for time travel and temporal anxiety.

The narrator also tutors Roberto, an eight-year-old at a dual-language school in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Together they research and write a children's book about how the brontosaurus was a scientific error. Roberto confides apocalyptic fears drawn from YouTube: global warming, a second ice age, and his family's vulnerability as undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, the narrator begins a relationship with Alena, a conceptual artist who artificially ages her paintings with fine cracks. Their dynamic is intense but deliberately uncommitted.

When Hurricane Irene approaches, the city becomes "one organism" (17), strangers talking freely on the subway, social barriers dissolving. The narrator stays at Alex's apartment, where they eat by candlelight, watch films, and share a moment of quiet physical intimacy. When the storm fails to materialize, the closeness between them dissolves, "retrospectively erased" because "those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived" (24).

Inspired by Christian Marclay's The Clock, a 24-hour film montage synchronized with real time, the narrator writes a story transposing elements of his life: Alex becomes Liza, Alena becomes Hannah, his cardiac condition becomes a brain tumor. The New Yorker accepts the story. The novel's second chapter presents this published story, "The Golden Vanity," in its entirety. In it, "the author" experiences overwhelming beauty in a cab ride after a tooth extraction under sedation, intensified by his awareness that the drugs will erase the memory. The next morning he discovers he remembers everything, "which means it never happened" (81), since the beauty depended on its anticipated obliteration. The phrase echoes the novel's central refrain, borrowed from a Hassidic story: "Everything will be as it is now, just a little different" (54).

Back in the main narrative, the narrator provides a sperm sample in an extended comic sequence, then imagines explaining his and Alex's arrangement to a future child, the conversation spiraling into questions about ethics and whether to reproduce when the world seems to be ending. At the Park Slope Food Coop, he hears fellow member Noor describe how learning that her biological father is not the Lebanese man who raised her destabilized her sense of identity. Noor compares the experience to a friend who poured out his heart on the phone, only to discover the call had been dropped: "It happened but it didn't happen. It's not nothing but it never occurred" (107).

At a panel at Columbia University, the narrator traces his poetic origins to the 1986 Challenger disaster, describing the false memory shared by millions of Americans who believe they watched the explosion live but actually saw replays. He locates his vocation not in original creation but in recycling: prosody and grammar as shared material for building social worlds. A distinguished author at the subsequent dinner tells him to "just do it all" (126). Drunk, he goes to Alex's apartment, tries to kiss her, and proposes they conceive through intercourse. She hits him with a pillow and sends him to the futon.

He visits Alena's "Institute for Totaled Art," where she has acquired artworks declared to have zero market value after sustaining damage. The narrator is most moved by pieces showing no visible damage yet stripped of worth, objects he calls "a utopian readymade" from "a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price" (134).

The narrator departs for a five-week writing residency in Marfa, Texas, where he falls out of conventional time, keeping a nocturnal schedule and speaking to almost no one for over two weeks. He writes a long meditative poem instead of the contracted novel. Visiting the Chinati Foundation, he is profoundly moved by Donald Judd's aluminum box installations in refurbished artillery sheds, which feel "first and foremost like a memorial" (180). Driving to view the Marfa Lights, mysterious glowing spheres reported in the desert for over a century, he sees nothing but resolves to abandon the novel he proposed and replace it with "the book you're reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them" (194).

Returning to New York, the narrator and Alex visit her dying mother, Emma, in New Paltz. That night they have sex for the first time, awkwardly but successfully. The narrator notes that "what was most powerful about the experience was how it changed nothing" (204). A follow-up echocardiogram shows his aorta at 4.3 centimeters, effectively unchanged given the instrument's margin of error. He ends his relationship with Alena at Alex's request.

Roberto receives copies of their self-published book, To the Future, but is unimpressed, more anxious about the approaching storm. Hurricane Sandy then strikes New York, causing catastrophic damage to lower Manhattan, though the narrator's neighborhood is virtually untouched. Alex is now pregnant. A sonogram confirms a heartbeat, and the narrator, whose own heart was recently imaged on a similar machine, notes the parallel.

In the final movement, the narrator and Alex walk from the Upper East Side through unelectrified lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. Streetlights go dark, intersections become ungoverned, and among the dark towers of the Financial District, a single bright glow persists: Goldman Sachs, its generators keeping it illuminated. The narrator says he will use this image for the cover of "the one I've written in its place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction" (237). The final pages shift into future tense. On the bus home, an elderly woman guesses Alex is expecting a girl. They pass a ghost bike, a white-painted bicycle memorializing a dead cyclist named Liz Padilla. Alex suggests dedicating the book to her. Looking back at "the totaled city" (240), the narrator closes with an echo of Walt Whitman: "I know it's hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is" (240).