Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 offers us a strikingly contemporary depiction of New York: the narrative begins and ends with the hurricanes Irene and Sandy, which hit the city in August 2011 and October 2012 respectively. And near the start the narrator, also called Ben, allows an Occupy Wall Street protestor he connected with via the classifieds website craigslist to use his shower and washing machine. Ben also ruminates on the ethical implications of co-operative food stores in gentrified Brooklyn, and he and his best friend Alex go for drinks in a hipster bar complete with ‘Edison bulb sconces’ and ‘carefully selected ephemera on the walls [which] dated from before the Civil War’ (136, 135). The novel itself also fits squarely within the genre of autofiction, which while not a new form, has certainly become more prevalent within the past decade or so. Yet while such motifs from the twenty-first century are scattered throughout 10:04, the novel’s central thematic concerns date back much further, as it grapples with issues that were a particular preoccupation for twentieth-century modernist writers: the ‘extraordinary discrepancy’ Virginia Woolf famously outlined between clock time and ‘time in the mind’ (Orlando 68); the alienating effect of urban spaces; and, at the level of form, fragmentation and discordant images. Ben’s repeated retreats into his own imagination, and his privileging of narrative time (films, literature, personal histories) lead to frequent bouts of temporal confusion – absences from conventional routine which amount to a ‘falling out of time’ (Lerner 166). The lines from Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens which punctuate the novel serve to underline the isolation Ben experiences himself and notices all around him: connections are hard-won in this version of New York which (if those storms are any indication) is moving swiftly towards an impending apocalypse while under the grip of global capitalism. These feelings of estrangement are reflected in the novel’s dislocated structure: the frequent juxtaposition of unrelated scenes (and even lines) creates a sense of discombobulation both for Ben and also for the reader, who is sometimes unsure how the parts connect together, or even which character is speaking. But the novel also subtly interrogates Ben’s angle of vision: his recourse to modernist writing as a means to conceptualise the contemporary moment suggests a frame of reference that is anachronistic, a sterile and inappropriate commentary on the pressures of neoliberalism.