Social Home

Social Home: The Spaces We Share

Ben Lerner, 10:04 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
Climate Fiction Collection
Vanderbilt University Library

Lerner explores how the city functions as both a built environment and a community. The climate crisis disrupts New York City as two storms shut down the power grid. The novel links this physical moment to social connection: even as disaster strikes, the city persists collectively. 10:04 emphasizes how a city is a social home, functioning as a space for the urban community to connect and see themselves as part of a larger whole.

“Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs”.

(17)

Different social groups meet in a social space, the subway, and discuss the incoming storm. The privileged narrator’s journey to Whole Foods highlights that, despite differing destinations, this “common conversation” dissolves barriers, inviting a “glow of increasing sociability” (17).