“Transcription” by Ben Lerner

This short novel is Lerner auto-fiction at its best. So many crisp sentences; so much mystery about what is fact and what is fiction. The play of memory and how the past works on the narrative present. How much of this novel is about that Rosemarie Waldrop 2024 Paris Review interview on poetry? How much of the character of “Thomas” is actually Lerner’s other mentor and collaborator, Alexander Kluge? What details in the novel are true? Does it even matter?

The conceit of the novel is the narrator drops his iPhone into his hotel sink on the way to interview his mentor, in the age of post-covid, at his home just off Brown’s campus in Providence. Much of the novel revolves obliquely around humanity’s present relationship with technology. “I was almost due at Thomas’s…. To tell him the truth seemed impossible. How was it that even though I’d been concerned about bungling the technology I hadn’t borrowed a backup recording device from my anthropologist wife? In my head a poet friend who was retraining as an analyst suggested I’d been unconsciously driven to sabotage my interview.”

As the narrator, Lerner, walks across Brown’s campus to Thomas’ home, his relationships with time and technology synch, “I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.”

Thomas is a formidable presence in everyone’s life whom he touches. “I’d always encountered Thomas in medias res: when you visited, you were swept into some task or conversation, skipping over the conventional greetings. This was a relief because Thomas was one of those people I didn’t know how to touch; a handshake would seem too businesslike; a hug was impossible—the word in my head was French.” Thomas is not one for small talk, “We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more…. But politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no? And that is a test of the fire, of the culture. This is better than psychoanalysis, which makes it property of the individual. So we should continue our dreaming now.”

The third and last section of the novel switches the narrator to Thomas’ son, with whom Thomas had a complicated relationship. The setup is that it is a chat between the son and Lerner, but it reads like a long monologue, with only the briefest of interjections interspersed. The son, Max, visits Thomas at Brown after he has been released from a Providence hospital after almost dying from covid. Max had said his last goodbyes over an iPhone call arranged by Thomas’ nurse, which has turned out to not have actually been the end. “All he recalled of the ordeal was being ‘awoken’ by the EMTs, as if he’d just been dozing in his chair, and then he recalled ‘the cacophony’ of the hospital, but mostly it was ‘empty space, just a long and dreamless sleep’ until he was off the ventilator, feeling sore and woozy. He wasn’t much changed, and yet he was utterly changed…. I remember thinking as I sat there drinking my coffee, scanning the walls, the piles of books, that the change might well have been in me—that I’d been altered by what I’d said, even if he’d never heard it or couldn’t remember it (are those the same thing?). I’d never had the chance to say goodbye to my mom and now I’d said goodbye to my dad but he’d come back from the dead and here I was to check on him.”

Finally, Max makes his own sort of mirrored confession to the Lerner character, “You’re not understanding. I’d already plugged my phone charger into the outlet near the table, one of those wireless chargers where you just lay your phone against the plate. I pressed record on my voice memo app and set it down on the charger. It was obscured from his view by the lamp—not that he would have paid much attention to it anyway…. No, I didn’t tell him that I was recording, I have no real reason to think he suspected anything, and I just lobbed some questions at him about his past—‘I can’t remember who cooked in your house growing up, was it only your mother?’—and then let him hold forth…. I was only half listening—I’d let my device do the listening as I sipped my wine and nodded—so I felt freed up to really look at him.”

“10:04” by Ben Lerner

Lerner has autobiographical fiction down. This novel is primarily about him struggling to write this novel. “I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work, that like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.” At this novel’s crux is a previously published New Yorker story embedded complete within it. That story’s real world literary strength was supposedly how Ben, the narrator, was given a six figure advance for this very novel. Sometimes it gets even more meta, as when the embedded New Yorker story references its author, Ben, reflecting on his first novel’s narrator, who is also a sometimes-less-than-flattering version of Ben (but named Adam). “He’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical…. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.” Ben, this novel’s narrator, is most definitely a gentrified Brooklynite. “I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river.” He is also an unabashed hipster—a supporter of Occupy Wall Street and a member of his local food coop. “As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.” But he also wants to show he is not one of those hipsters; he is not too cool for school (and still has his Midwestern charm). “I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar.” Some of his best stories are memories of his youth, which serve as asides on topics he is mulling over as his present narratorial self. “In the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time.” Pages later, he returns to the riff. “Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence…. I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.”

“Leaving The Atocha Station” by Ben Lerner

By the first page of this novel you know exactly who this narrator is. “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate the noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited the coffee…. Next my project required dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed. Then I’d find my bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, drugs, and leave for the Prado.” This type of self-styled creative is well worn, but still worth getting into the head of when portrayed convincingly. Soon, he is pondering art. “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change…. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf.” The narrator, Adam, is living in Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship, supposedly researching a historical epic on the Spanish Civil War to be written in verse. He spends much of his time scoring hash from African illegal immigrants, flirting with women, and making fun of the American tourists (in his own head). He can speak rudimentary Spanish, but in his struggle to learn it better he alternates between false confidence and hopelessness. “My plan had been to teach myself Spanish by reading masterworks of Spanish literature and I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavor and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time.” Often, his struggle with language generates his most beautiful thoughts. “The song was Portugese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled.” Adam is a published poet and he is always trying to measure up to other writers, both past and present. “I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own…. I just smiled slightly in a way intended to communicate that my own compliment had been graciousness and that I in fact believed his writing constituted a new low for his or any language, his or any art.” Adam is immensely concerned with appearances, his and others, and, so, often puts on a pose. “I didn’t know how to compose my face, if indifference tinged with vague disdain was still the right expression. If I could have smiled Teresa’s inscrutable smile, I would have.” However, through it all, his self-importance is saved by his slightly biting humor. “The prospect of being a writer in residence in a modern palace frequented by the beautiful was not without its allure, however exhausting it would be for my face.”

“The Topeka School” by Ben Lerner

Lerner’s novel is auto-fiction, written from the perspectives of multiple narrative voices, but also trying to comment on the larger societal forces that have shaped America today. It uses the microscopic lens of one boy’s coming of age to comment on macro political trends. Lerner’s “Self” is fictionalized as Adam Gordon, a senior at Topeka High, class of 1997. The novel shifts between being told in the third person from high school Adam’s vantage point to contemporary first person narratives by his father, Jonathan, and his mother, Jane. The novel also sometimes gets meta, with contemporary Adam, speaking as a novelist in 2019, interjecting with commentary. “Who is this unsmiling seventeen-year-old boy whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised?” The chapters flow seamlessly between these voices. The multiple perspectives allow the family history to gradually unfold through flashbacks, as the reader sees how the family unit has been shaped by each individual’s subjective processing of past events. Both of Adam’s parents are psychoanalysts, adding to the layers of disguised meaning. During the course of the narrative, sexual boundaries are explored, gender roles are questioned, alcohol and drugs are abused, race and socioeconomic hierarchy is churned over, multiple infidelities are exposed, repressed incest is recollected, and a thrown cueball breaks a young girl’s jaw. It is also a hilarious book. “Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.”

The novel deals with the tensions of being the Gordons, an intellectual family stuck living in Kansas. “The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy—even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony.” Lerner suggests that the process of growing up for an adolescent boy was all one big pose. It involved navigating the subtle images that one wanted to project to multiple audiences at once—your parents, your peers, your teachers. “The thin beige braided belt he wore to secure his sagging pants for instance somehow constituted less a single bad decision than a deep incomprehension of the language game in which he was attempting to feign fluency.” Even adult role models teach that your image of Self is a role one puts on. “You need to be winning hearts as much as minds. What you have in your favor is Kansas. You have Midland American English. I want quick swerves into the folksy. “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” That kind of thing. I want you saying, right after some hyper-eloquent riff about Yeltsin breaking a promise, “Now, in Kansas, we call that a lie.” After you go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on that.” I don’t care if they’re tried-and-true. Say “tried-and-true.” Say “ain’t” if you want. You can go agrammatical so long as they know it’s a choice, that it’s in quotes. Interrupt your highbrow fluency with bland sound bites of regional decency. Why do you think they elect Texans who went to Yale, Arkansan Rhodes Scholars?” Lerner implies that there was a fine line, made up of tiny individual life decisions, that separated him, now a professor of English at Brooklyn College, from the boys who would grow up to be stuck in Topeka, now wearing red MAGA hats in 2019. “Instead of focusing on the fight, zoom in on the fascinating and absurd spectacle of the gang signs that precede it: Reynolds, the son of Realtors, working his fingers into the word “blood,” throwing up his set, miming the manual language of a Los Angeles street gang to which he could bear no coherent relation; see Nowak, who has a real if unloaded pistol tucked into the waist of his sagging jeans, respond with a rapid array of finger movements based on the signs of “Folks,” which originated in the projects of Chicago, which may or may not have been a presence in Topeka, but certainly not among these white kids mainly bound for college who had no volk beyond their common privilege.” Throughout Adam’s life, everything, in the end, comes down to power dynamics. “We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies; we were two sovereignless men in a Hobbesian state of nature on the verge of primal confrontation.” Lerner’s novel questions how much of one’s Self is really up to the individual; how many of one’s actions are shaped by a past we might have no control over. “I was having my own experience of depersonalization, no drugs involved—an overwhelming sense of frames of reference giving way, of the past and present colliding in on one another.”