Straight Man

On Ben Lerner's 'Transcription'

Ben Lerner in Paris, France, 2016, Photograph, Getty Images

Adjectives cling to Ben Lerner like cockleburs. He is “subtle and sinuous,” per James Wood in the New Yorker. His work is “virtuosic,” in the words of Tao Lin for The Believer. The MacArthur Foundation bestowed a fellowship upon him. Of or pertaining to the intellect — these are the descriptors that pile before his feet. It predated his turn into fiction, too. Back when he was exclusively a poet, his post-Language melding of theory and lyricism was similarly feted for its erudition. C. D. Wright declared that he possessed “an unfettered mind” when his first book of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, was published in 2004. (Lerner was only 25 years old at the time. He was precocious too!) The praise is accurate enough. His books contain dense paragraphs on Spanish prosody and historical trauma. But that misses the most important aspect of his work, the one that provides much of the pleasure his books offer. Lerner, you see, is funny.

Take his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station.¹ It’s the story of Adam Gordon, a twentysomething guy who bears an extremely strong resemblance to Lerner himself. It is 2004, and Gordon is studying in Madrid on a Fulbright fellowship. He is there to research the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, with the aim of composing some elegy or tribute to the brave souls who gave their lives in the struggle against fascism. He does no such thing, however. He mopes about in his room, smoking and Gchatting. He tries to woo a young Spanish woman with a truly bizarre pickup method, claiming that his father, an even-keeled psychiatrist, is actually a cruel and unremitting fascist. It is the sort of senseless, patently absurd fabrication one could imagine Larry David committing on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the prose, Lerner plays it completely straight, never once winking at the reader to gain their sympathy, which only makes it that much funnier. It is a comedy about youth meant for adults.

Lerner has written three more novels since then, including the just-published Transcription. They are all strong in particular ways. The hype is real. But none are quite as funny as his first. The plight of youth made for ideal comic material in that one. But Lerner writes novels that are highly steeped in his own biography, which means that his protagonists age at roughly the same rate he does himself. The effect recalls a film like Boyhood, which was filmed over the course of a dozen years to capture the time-lapse growth of a young man, or the Up documentary series, which begins with a group of seven-year-old children, then checks in on them every seven years in perpetuity. Time is Lerner’s medium as much as language. Time has made him an adult, with responsibilities and children, and that simply is not as funny as lying to girls when you’re in your 20s.

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Lerner’s highly autobiographical fiction puts him in league with other practitioners of autofiction, like Karl Ove Knausgåard, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti. The protagonist of My Struggle is even called “Karl Ove,” which heightens the queasiness endemic to such a personal mode. Lerner is slyer, however. As mentioned, Adam Gordon is the protagonist of Leaving the Athocha Station. The narrator of 10:04 seems to be Lerner himself, or a version of him. Adam returns in The Topeka School, along with several other characters, including his parents and a childhood friend, a troubled boy named Darren. The slipperiness owes much to Lerner’s origins as a brainy poet, one enamored with the ways identity can slip in and out of different registers. Transcription is arguably his most poetic novel, and not just on account of that slipperiness. The entire structure of the book, the way each section compresses its material while balancing against the other sections, recalls the deft architectural thinking of modernist and postmodernist poetry. Think of the five sections of The Waste Land, or the way Lyn Hejinian wrote My Life with 37 sections when she was 37 years old.

Open Transcription and you’ll see that it’s organized into three sections: Hotel Providence, [Hotel Villa Real], and Hotel Arbez. The brackets: so chic! Even before you open the book, you’ll notice that it’s slim, like a volume of poetry or a European novella. The first section opens with our narrator, yet another authorial alter ego, arriving in Providence, Rhode Island. He is there to interview Thomas, one of his former professors. The university in question is clearly Brown, where Lerner studied, and which has long been home to a distinguished constellation of experimental writers and artists. Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, the husband and wife avant-garde poets, taught there for decades; the character of Thomas appears to be based partly on them. Other luminaries who have taught there include Robert Coover, Brian Evenson, and Eleni Sikelianos.

The interview looks to be one of those Paris Review situations, where a writer talks to a more esteemed author further along in their career, discussing early influences while noting the afternoon light slanting through the window and illuminating the tasteful furniture. Indeed, Lerner himself has twice conducted interviews for the Paris Review, with Rosmarie Waldrop and Eileen Myles. Our narrator settles into his hotel room, preparing to walk the familiar undergrad streets on the way to interview Thomas. Before he can do that, though, he suffers a particularly modern pratfall: he knocks his phone into the sink. It’s ruined. He was going to use it to record the interview, then transcribe it later, hence the title. But he can’t do that now that he is, in a wonderfully distinctive phrase, “deviceless.”

The bricked phone is a welcome instance of Lerner’s humor, though it suggests a harried sitcom dad more than the caustic, desperate wit of his earlier work. It also elicits more of that patented Lerner prose: swooping clauses of thought that glint with insight and humor.

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.

Maybe he can explain the situation to Thomas, and they can do the interview later, once he’s bought a new phone from the Apple Store? But our narrator is unable to pull it off, for two reasons. First, he is a neurotic mess incapable of broaching awkward topics; and second, Thomas is a torrent of speech, launching into lectures and tangents from the moment the narrator enters his home. There is simply no stopping him. And so our narrator sits, and he listens.

The second section finds the narrator at a conference in Madrid. A memorial conference, it turns out. Thomas has since died. Colleagues and admirers from across the globe have gathered to offer tribute, including our narrator. We learn that he did publish the interview with Thomas, by recalling Thomas’ words as best he could and adding his own extrapolations. He told no one about this, however. It ended up being the last interview Thomas gave, and thus acquired a retroactive elegiac air. During the conference, the narrator reveals the true circumstances behind the interview, thinking Thomas would have appreciated the irony.

He may well have. The gathered mourners, however, do not appreciate it at all. They feel betrayed. This is a familiar Lerner dilemma, wherein our narrator prioritizes literature and art over human connection, and expects others to do the same. Will this conflict reach full boil in the third and concluding section?

Not directly, it turns out. Our narrator barely plays a part in the third section. Instead, he listens to someone who we learn is Thomas’ son, Max. Max and Thomas had a difficult relationship. It’s not easy, after all, to have an arcane wizard for a father. Through a switchbacking, Bernhardian monologue, Max describes his struggles as a son, and as a father, too. His own daughter experiences nutritional difficulties, declining to eat almost any food. Thomas calls her “the hunger artist,” recalling the Kafka story. Evocative, yes, but not exactly helpful parenting advice.

The humor glimpsed earlier in the book mostly recedes by this point, and in its place we have emotion and loss, as Max’s twin roles as son and father tug at him, and at our narrator, who listens throughout. It is genuinely affecting. I’ll admit it: I cried. Coming as it does at the end of a short and succinct book, the final pages feel less like a poem and more like a concerto’s satisfying resolution. Yet I also missed the earlier humor, enough that it compels me to ask a different question.

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Let us consider, then, the case against Ben Lerner.

The usual evidence in such a prosecution consists of identity markers. Lerner is a privileged white man who moves in, and writes about, spaces of immense privilege: hip New York neighborhoods, European conferences, art colonies in the Southwest. He writes about those enclaves and their denizens as if they all constitute one immense graduate seminar, ready to cite just the right experimental artwork with just the right $20 word.

All of that is true enough. Yet it does not bother me at all. Lerner writes so well, with such a knack for phrase-making, that I’m perfectly happy to read his navel-gazing accounts of his quotidian existence. Gimme gimme gimme. No, where I sometimes find myself growing impatient with Lerner, as I’ve followed his career for two decades now, has more to do with his own excess of patience. His increasing insistence on doing the right thing, or perhaps, being the right person.

Every poet is tempted to pander to their audience, to emote just the right lyrical aside about the state of the world to elicit that self-satisfied sigh. Lerner is no different. The most egregious instance of this occurred in his last novel, The Topeka School. That novel mostly takes place in the 1990s, telling a kind of origin story about what one could call “toxic masculinity.” That material is highly compelling on its own. Yet the final chapter sees a jump in time to the present day, where the Lerner stand-in attends a protest against the Trump administration, all but begging the reader to pat him on the back. And I resent it. Transcription thankfully does not feature anything this cloying. The references to the pandemic carry a more bemused air. Yet one can still sense Lerner calibrating his lyricism just so, striking the appropriate balance of awareness and concern.

Moments like that make me wish Lerner would stop caring so much about what others think. Strange as it is to say, I wish he would act a bit more like his contemporary Tao Lin. Lin has spent the past decade curing his own autism, ingesting psychedelic drugs, and cavorting with feral pigs. Some people consider him a joke, or even a fraud. Lin does not let that bother him, because he does not care what others think of him — at least, not enough to calibrate the traits that others find irritating. He continues on his own way without worrying what judgment others might pass on him.

I want Lerner to follow that example. I want him to quit caring what I think of him. I will continue to read every word he writes, for his felicity with language is extraordinary, and I hope that doesn’t matter to him at all.

Adam Fleming Petty is a writer living in Michigan. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Commonweal, and many other venues. He is the author of a novella, Followers. He maintains the newsletter Very Distant Lands.

1. The title is an elaborately grim joke. “Leaving the Atocha Station” is an early poem by John Ashbery, one of Lerner’s major influences. The Atocha station itself is the central railway hub of Madrid, the Grand Central Terminal of the Iberian plain. On March 11, 2004 — precisely 911 days after September 11, 2001 — the Atocha station was bombed in an act of terrorism sympathetic to Al-Qaeda, although no direct responsibility with the group was ever established. The title, then, dramatizes Gordon’s comic plight: to escape poetry and return to the real world.