Critic-at-Large

You Call This Fiction, But It is More 

Ben Lerner’s Transcription 

Lest I sound like just another gay guy who heard of Ben Lerner via Lorde’s Instagram story last week (“No living writer has affected me more”, the singer wrote on April 14th), let me set the record straight by saying that actually I’ve been reading him since I was sixteen, thank you very much. Lerner was the writer that first introduced me to literary criticism (in his extraordinary monograph The Hatred of Poetry); who first made experimental fiction real to me (in his hilarious and incisive Leaving the Atocha Station); and who first introduced me to—would you believe it?—the sonnet sequence (in his ruthless, lyrical, and abstract The Lichtenberg Figures; sorry, Shakespeare!). 

Lerner found some real crossover success with 2019’s The Topeka School, a novel that concerns itself with 90s teenhood in the wake of Columbine, and the empty rhetoric of high school debate as it seeds, in the life and mind of its narrator, the Trump-era breakdown of public speech. The poet-turned-novelist returned to his roots with a stellar poetry collection in 2024, The Lights, which to my mind made much less of a splash, critically speaking, than it should’ve. Transcription follows The Lights quite nicely in the sense that it continues Lerner’s career-long fascination with disembodied voices, recording technology, storytelling and narrating, social histories, and aesthetic experiences. It was, however,  sharpened by The Lights’ formal gesture: an alternating between prose poems fractured by the associative leaps of the lyric and lyrics overwhelmed by the discourses of reportage and scholarship native to prose. 

Transcription also continues Lerner’s work in a genre that’s been called by some critics “autofiction”, a portmanteau of “autobiography” and “fiction”. The narrators of Lerner’s novels tend to have quite a bit in common with their author, and they tend to comment either directly or obliquely on the artifice of fiction itself—when at one point Transcription’s unnamed narrator is asked what his daughter’s name is, you can hear Lerner shadow his reply: “I call her Eva in this book.” Pushing closer together genres which, at their surface, seem to exist far apart (prose and poetry; autobiography and fiction) is a hallmark of Lerner’s work. As his career enters its middle period its new thrill is in the intensifying of this process. 

“Pressure creates diamonds” is the common idiom here—but anyone who has worked a minimum-wage job can tell you that pressure also creates fractures, confusions, lies, elisions, and frustrations. Transcription puts the novel itself under pressure. Our unnamed narrator has travelled back to Providence, his uni town, to conduct the final interview with his now-ninety-year-old teacher, Thomas—a kindly avant-guardist, a beloved professor, somewhat of a child of the Frankfurt style of critical theory. But as he leaves his hotel for Thomas’, he drops his phone—inexplicably his only recording device—in the sink. The first of the novel’s three parts we read, therefore, as a reconstruction of the interview that was never recorded. The narrator walks as much into Thomas’ house as his own past, armed with only his memory. Then the novel breaks, and we resume a year or so later, at a conference, before it breaks again, and we hear from a conversation with a new interlocutor whose daughter struggles with eating. Here I wish I could tell you more about these latter parts of the triptych, but a large part of the pleasure of reading the novel is in seeing them unfold in all their resolute unexpectedness.

Nonetheless my point is that, where Lerner’s earlier novels were about fractures, confusions, lies, elisions, and frustrations—but largely subsumed these to the higher ordering structures of plot, character, and narration—Transcription is more overtly experimental. And it is, in this, his least successful novel. This is primarily in the sense that it aspires beyond novelistic convention and therefore thwarts our expectations of what novels ought to be. Secondarily, while it has that aspiration, it also has extraordinarily convincing description, dramatic character work, and startling moments of syllogism. This is exemplified in this passage, where Lerner, his narrator having gone to see the hyper-realistic glass flower sculptures on display at Harvard, draws a paragraph to its conclusion in a supremely beautiful flourish: 

“I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artists was claiming were glass — they probably replaced them each night — but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between language and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction”.” 

Though Transcription aspires beyond novelistic convention, there is still so much novelistic liveliness in its pages. Lerner captures so much of contemporary life in all its dissonance; our devices—phones, language, memories—that alternately connect and disconnect, locate and dislocate us. Though his purpose is not Mozart’s, which was to situate dissonances within a larger consonant scheme; to sing us back home. Transcription resembles less a contemporary novel like, for example, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and more a contemporary novel like, for example, Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? 

Or, to put it much more simply, I finished Transcription wanting more, feeling it partial or incomplete. Or, if I’m being kinder, feeling as though it retained that glimmer of the virtual; to paraphrase Simon Frith, those traces found in the difficult of another world in which the difficult runs clear and easy. I was still keen to hear more of the novel’s ideas, or to try and thread together more of the frayed fabric-ends that constitute what we might tentatively call its plot. It also feels—in the more literal sense of the word, holding it in my hands—wanting as an object, too. My advance copy runs only to a light 131 pages. Always leave them wanting more—I suppose that’s what they tell touring musicians, isn’t it? Still, it takes a performer of serious ability to manifest such a feeling—a feeling of evocative incompleteness—and Lerner is certainly up to the task. This new Ben Lerner book probably sucks but it’s still the best thing you’ll read until, you know, the next Ben Lerner book.