The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel
Several years ago, when I was profiling Ben Lerner for the Times Magazine, I spent an afternoon with him at the Whitney Museum. As we walked from room to room, Lerner spoke in freely flowing paragraphs about the paintings on the walls and the memories they stirred in him, much like the narrators of his form-breaking autofictions, who often find themselves looking at art. The parade of styles, of homage and revolt, from the chromatic frenzy of Pollock and de Kooning to the deadpan rigor of Ruscha and Johns, led to the question of Lerner’s formation. Because many of his major forebears were women (Rosmarie Waldrop, Eileen Myles, Juliana Spahr, C. D. Wright), he believed he’d been spared the anxiety of influence, which, in Harold Bloom’s telling, is largely patrilineal. The idea struck me as a little too neat. Of course, there was also John Ashbery, a presiding spirit in his body of work. Lerner, a prodigy, published three books of verse before, at the age of thirty-two, turning to fiction, the form in which he has made his reputation. Shifting to prose, he’d suggested earlier, was his way of creating distance from Ashbery, whose echo resounds in those earlier texts. If this wasn’t anxious, it was hardly relaxed.
The following day, I uploaded the interview, recorded on my iPhone, to Otter.ai, a recently launched transcription service, hoping to save myself hours of work. Instead, as I skimmed the results it quickly spat out, I was seized by panic. The lucid discussion I remembered now read like a stream of dissociative drivel. Here was Lerner speaking of his interest in “generic hunting scenes, medical art, or occasional genitalia.” Later, he mentioned a “Bolivian account” that was “very invested in a gong strong father,” adding (no less puzzlingly), “He was asked to be an edible drama.” Elsewhere, Lerner seemed afraid that a threatening figure named “Gaspar” was “going to kill me responding to my fiction.” It was like something from one of his novels, which are filled with moments of semantic vertigo, when everyday language stops making sense and starts to resemble an Ashbery poem.
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As I soon came to grasp, with a shiver of relief, these glitches were caused by the A.I. “mishearing” what, to human ears, was perfectly intelligible. “Gaspar,” I realized, playing back the audio, was Ashbery; the irony Lerner noted was that the poet “who counted to me” in such a significant way—not “who was going to kill me”—had responded with enthusiasm to his fiction, not his poetry. The “Bolivian account” that was “invested in a gong strong father” was actually a “Bloomian account . . . invested in an agon of strong fathers.” For Bloom, Lerner had said skeptically, poetic influence always “has to be an Oedipal drama,” not an “edible” one. (“Occasional genitalia” was harder to explain.)
Oedipal dramas really are at the center of Lerner’s new novel, as are the bugs in recording technologies. “Transcription” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which presents a darker vision of influence than the one that Lerner shared with me, is the story of an interview and its unexpected fallout. The interviewer is an unnamed writer in early middle age, the usual Lerner proxy. He has travelled from New York to Providence, Rhode Island, to speak to an old mentor for a magazine. The mentor is Thomas, a world-renowned author, philosopher, and filmmaker who grew up in Nazi Germany and rubbed shoulders with twentieth-century giants such as Theodor Adorno. As a Brown undergraduate, the narrator took one of Thomas’s classes, which marked him indelibly. Now, more than twenty years later, the COVID pandemic has the world in its grip. Thomas, who is ninety, has recently survived a bout with the virus. It’s been decades since he sat for an interview, and this one, we sense, may well be his last. The stage seems set for a solemn farewell—the first in a series of sly indirections.
Like Lerner’s previous protagonists, the narrator is something of an intellectual klutz, at once Chekhov and Chaplin. Preparing for the interview in his hotel room, he knocks his iPhone into the bathroom sink, breaking it. He has no other means of recording the conversation, but instead of telling Thomas—the prospect is too humiliating—he hatches a face-saving proposal: this evening, they’ll just catch up off the record before conducting the interview proper the next day (once the narrator has bought a new phone). Thomas has no objections, but when the talk turns naturally to the subject of his childhood he wonders if they shouldn’t start recording: “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural.” Helplessly, without explanation, the narrator suggests that they stick to the plan. “But here we are talking,” Thomas says, asserting authority, in his starched yet expressive Continental English, which Lerner renders faultlessly. “So we begin, OK?” Thus ensnared in a fiction of his making, the narrator takes his phone out and pretends to press Record.
In Lerner’s work, which abounds with liars, fiction begets fiction. As the night wears on, and Thomas shares an archive’s worth of memories and wisdom, we come to feel the narrator’s giddy dread: all this precious speech is being lost, going unpreserved for future generations. Except here it all is, page after page of luminous table talk. “There is always music playing that we cannot hear,” Thomas says in one of his impromptu arias about voices and vibrations:
And so the irony of Lerner’s title comes brightly into focus: since there was no recording, there can be no transcription. What we are reading, instead, is the narrator’s reconstruction, a volatile compound of the fictive and the real. Much like the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues (which the novel frequently alludes to), Thomas, in a sense, is the narrator’s invention.
But it isn’t just the narrator making free with his sources. Thomas bears a resemblance to, among others, Alexander Kluge, the acclaimed author, philosopher, and filmmaker, who was also born in Nazi Germany and knew Adorno. Kluge’s intentional muddling of fiction and reality, his alertness to the humor of intellectual chatter, and the way he uses photos in his texts are all features that Lerner has adopted. In 2017, when Lerner interviewed him for The Paris Review, Kluge was full of metaphysical drolleries (“It would be arbitrary to say that we cannot know anything about angels just because they very rarely come into laboratories”), which now sound, paradoxically, like Thomasisms. A transcript, which appears to be authentic, is reproduced in “The Snows of Venice” (2018), a hybrid work of fiction, poetry, and roving dialogues co-authored by Lerner and his precursor.
“Transcription,” you could say, is the inauthentic transcript of Lerner’s dialogues with Kluge. The book reworks him—a new specialty here, a change of address there—in a way that resembles what its narrator does with Thomas. (Kluge, for instance, has never taught at Brown, Lerner’s alma mater.) In “The Snows of Venice,” fiction, poetry, and interviews are labelled as such; in “Transcription,” you’re never sure what’s what. As with all of Lerner’s novels, the book is formally unstable, “a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them,” as he wrote in “10:04.” Lerner rightly insists that “the correspondence between text and world” matters less than the “intensities” of the text itself. Yet, as with a leaf insect or a fata morgana, those intensities arise, time and again, from our never quite knowing what, exactly, we are looking at.
There are further instabilities at play in the text. When the narrator asks Thomas about his Hitlerite parents, a subject he’s previously been keen to avoid, he replies, “I am happy to speak of my family. And they speak through me.” The same thing goes for the writers of the past, who speak through their inheritors. The narrator, we notice, can sound a lot like his mentor. How much our voices are really our own is a question the novel obsessively circles. If Thomas, so to speak, is his mentee’s invention, the reverse may be true as well. Kluge, too, can take credit for Lerner. For it was Kluge, along with Ashbery and the others, who showed Lerner his potential fully realized and embodied. “The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is,” as Emerson wrote in his essay “The Poet.”
According to Harold Bloom, however, reverence is not an attitude that leads to great art: it leads to counterfeits and knockoffs, to Coldplays and De Palmas. “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves,” he writes in “The Anxiety of Influence.” Or, to put it another way (and putting it another way, for Bloom as for Lerner, is the essence of innovation): weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having broken their iPhones, creatively recast. It’s a process that involves a necessary betrayal. Thomas is at once an intellectual hero and a kind of surrogate father to the narrator. Still, in the way of many great men, he is “not uncomplicated.” Haughty and irascible, he uses refinement as a screen for aggression, a habit his protégé disloyally records. When the narrator asks if the radio was really “always” on in the house where he grew up, as Thomas has claimed, he loftily retorts, “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law.”
One person who does practice law is Thomas’s actual son, Max, with whom, we gather, he is not on good terms. “He became very angry at me recently for my forgetfulness,” Thomas cryptically explains. “He angers easily. That is from his mother.” As we soon learn, Max’s mother was bipolar and killed herself when he was still a young child. The wound of this loss appears to have reopened following Thomas’s experience with Covid. Scattered and unsteady, he begins to come unmoored. “You accuse me, it seems,” he tells the narrator, apparently mistaking his student for his son. (The two were friends at Brown.) “That I could not bring down your mother—” The narrator tries to correct him, but Thomas’s fugue keeps gathering momentum. “That she has to put stones in the pockets, that she exchanged the medium of air for water. And yes, that I was distant in my research.” Nothing makes his distance more tangible than the pompous euphemism “air for water.”
Words, Lerner shows, lead double lives, including the one he has taken for his title. To transcribe is not simply to make a written copy (whether faithful or not); it is also to convert a text or a piece of music into a different form. Thomas, like Kluge, is steeped in Kafka, whose fiction the novel repeatedly invokes. Yet, as becomes clear during Thomas’s meltdown, what Lerner is doing goes beyond mere allusion: he is performing a kind of free-jazz cover of Kafka’s “The Judgment.” In that brief, hallucinatory story, a young man suggests to his ailing father that it’s time to retire. Enraged by this perceived usurpation, the old man disowns him, claiming that one of his son’s best friends was the child he’d truly wanted. Then, in a startling turn, he sentences him to death—an order the son obediently follows.
In “Transcription,” too, we have a fearsome patriarch, a struggle for authority, a son by blood and a son by spirit. The difference between Kafka and his heir—between canonical source and hectic transcription—is more than a matter of Lerner’s reshufflings; it is a matter of his view toward difference itself. In Kafka, change is unthinkable. “So you were lying in wait for me,” the son says in “The Judgment,” grasping that he was doomed from the start. In Lerner, there is always a margin of hope.
Resisting despair, both private and social, has long been central to Lerner’s mission. “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), his début novel, channels a mood of cultural stagnation. Adam Gordon, its poet narrator, lies about everything except his own fraudulence (“that I was a fraud had never been in question—who wasn’t?”), but what saves the book from being merely symptomatic is his closeted idealism. This idealism gets a wider berth in “10:04” (2014), whose narrator, another shifty poet, is forever catching glimpses of how things might be. As a tropical storm bears down on New York and subway riders show sudden camaraderie, “what normally felt like the only possible world,” he says, “became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs.” That sense of possibility was forced back underground in “The Topeka School” (2019), which confronts the disaster of Trump’s first election. Set mainly in nineteen-nineties Kansas, during Adam Gordon’s childhood, the novel suggests that the so-called end of history, complacently proclaimed by the era’s centrist pundits, was actually the seedbed of our crypto-fascist present.
“Transcription” represents a tactical retreat. The novel, Lerner’s shortest to date, is a chamber piece, more compressed and crystallized than any of its predecessors. As it was during the pandemic, the wider social world is mostly just a rumor. What we see of it comes filtered through screens—or reflected in the lives of the people it’s unravelled. Later in the book, after Thomas has died, the narrator visits Max at his home in California, where another hypnotic two-hander unfolds. In a subtle reworking of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” Max recounts how, before the pandemic, his young daughter, Emmie, was afflicted by arfid, an eating disorder. Emmie’s condition is an interpretative riddle for both her parents and the reader. How does it connect to the rest of the novel? Is she starving herself, Max desperately wonders, “because she is registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism?” In fact, it may be more about the past.
A third sense of “transcription”—what occurs during gene expression, when the information in a strand of DNA gets converted into protein—is now deftly drawn out. The process involves the selective activation of what’s been handed down, which is one way to think about Emmie’s condition. Lerner, who has two young daughters, has spoken of the parallels between writing and parenting. Both involve reshaping old patterns inherited from forebears (literary, familial) in an effort to form new ones. Thomas, it seems, was an imperfect father. We recall his words from the novel’s first section, intended for Max but delivered to the narrator: “I sound angry but I think it is yours, the anger, reflected in me.” It is hard to imagine a more infuriating statement, especially from one’s father. Whatever its source, the anger has clearly echoed down the years, from one voice to another. Thanks to Lerner’s mastery of the novel—the most capacious recording technology invented so far—we come to understand Emmie’s disorder as the latest variation on an age-old theme. Once this pattern has been recognized, new ones can begin to be formed.
But if anger has a long half-life in this book, then so does love. At the start of the pandemic, Thomas is hospitalized with COVID, placed on a ventilator, and seems certain to die. “Emmie will carry you with her, she loves you so much, the love goes on forever in both ways,” Max tells him by phone, that last phrase borrowed, whether wittingly or not, from a video his daughter has been watching for school. (In the original, it is geometric lines that “go on forever.”) Thomas is unable to speak, but a nurse reports that he’d seemed to understand. Delivered of his message, Max feels at peace—only to hear later that his father has pulled through. When he visits him, it’s unclear what, if anything, Thomas remembers, and Max feels unable to repeat what he’d said. They argue, as usual; and so the “good” ending, when the words had come out right, is replaced by this bad one.
Except nothing in this exquisite, shape-shifting novel is quite what it seems—words least of all. For Lerner, language is both a symbol and the medium of human reciprocity, a long collective poem we each assume is ours alone. Max’s argument with his father, it slowly grows clear, is what Thomas had been stewing on when the narrator went to see him. As we begin to reread, dissociative drivel is jolted into meaning. “To forgive each other we must acknowledge that these forces are too great,” Thomas says to the man he’s mistaken for his son. “That die Familie, it is a tiny station in a grid. Economic and electric. Or a dish, receiving from space. The love, it must go on forever in both ways.” ♦