On a recent afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, two standard poodles could be found lounging among the Monets. No one was looking at the water lilies; everyone was photographing the animals (allowed there as medical-alert dogs), particularly the white one, which had fine braids woven into its hair.

Ben Lerner, the poet turned novelist, was at the Met to visit the painting at the heart of his new novel, “10:04,” to be published on Sept. 2 by Faber & Faber. He can’t stay away from museums. Crucial scenes in his books are set at the Met, the Prado, the Picasso Museum in Barcelona.

“They’re these huge laboratories for all the different contradictory notions of what art is,” he said. Or, he added in the wry, lightly despairing voice of his fiction, “a place to show off your poodles.”

The painting Mr. Lerner, 35, had come to see is Jules Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc,” which depicts Joan swooning as she hears the call to battle. It’s something of a famous failure, but Mr. Lerner loves its flaws: “I like paintings that depict what paintings can’t depict, like hearing voices.” He said that the “glitches in the pictorial matrix” in this otherwise naturalistic painting — the cartoonish angels, the way Joan’s left hand dissolves into the paint — inspired his new novel’s questions about how artists render phenomena that seem impossible to describe: the passage of time, the texture of consciousness.