Although the exact dates remain hazy, I think it is safe to say that sometime between 2009 and 2014 it became officially embarrassing to be a novelist. Or so the novelists told us at the time. Take Rachel Cusk, for example, who after writing seven well-regarded novels dismissed fiction as “fake and embarrassing” in an interview. “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous,” she said.
There were manifestoes against artifice (David Shields’s “Reality Hunger”), and autofiction — which blurs the boundaries between writer and protagonist — became ascendant. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” a six-volume novel that deployed minutely detailed descriptions of the mundane (making tea, changing a diaper) in a refusal to obscure reality, became a global sensation. “Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous,” Knausgaard declared (there was a lot of declaring at the time). The last line of the last book in the series reads: “And I’m so happy that I’m no longer an author.”
Of course, Knausgaard, as well as everyone else, went right on writing fiction, but the novel did spend some time slumped in the stocks. It was condemned for being complacent, conservative, politically irresponsible, if not outright oppressive in its claim to tell a larger social story. How could we be expected to stuff the splendor of our contemporary consciousness into the 19th-century corset of narrative contrivance? To play make-believe while the world burned? “The novel is not a historically radical form,” Sally Rooney said in a public discussion with Ben Lerner. “How do we go about trying to encode some sort of political radicalism in a form that seems to resist it in its generic tendency?”
But there was another writer for whom the embarrassments and failures of the novel became muse and boon: Lerner himself, whose new book, “Transcription,” will be published this spring. Anointed “the most talented writer of his generation” by The Times, he is certainly among the most imitated and lavishly laureled — a winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant, and hailed as something of a savior of contemporary fiction. For Lerner, the novel never appears to be as interesting or as vital as when up to its ears in indolence and irrelevance, mucking around in all its putative solipsism, puerility and naïveté. He has found a form for fiction to accommodate all the difficult and unseemly feelings it provokes. His books insist upon their artifice and detail their own creation, down to the book advance. If Cusk deemed it “ridiculous” to make up characters like John and Jane and imagine their fates, well, here is Lerner’s novel “The Topeka School,” starring, as it happens, Jonathan and Jane Gordon, based on the author’s parents. He recreates their voices on the page with vivid moments of awkwardness to remind us that what we are reading has been shaped by the storyteller, their son.
What distinguishes Lerner’s autofiction is that its spirals of self-criticism, even self-contempt, land in a place of authentic feeling — and, often, in a defense of the novel. His narrators complain about a literary device only to turn around and give it a try, to see if it can be rehabilitated instead of discarded. Fiction’s fakery and artificiality are presented as uniquely revealing. Don’t we construct ourselves, too, moment by moment? His characters are forever passing on other people’s stories as their own or discovering that they have been deceived about key information in their own lives. Lerner once expressed special fondness for the semicolon because it can link phrases in any number of ways, suggesting all kinds of relationships — causal or logical. His work seems to function like that, yoking together the novel and its critique, reality and representation, cynicism and belief.
Above all, he makes a case that reading — our experience of decoding, observing patterns, interpreting and misinterpreting language — is not merely a means of accessing a version of reality but an event in itself, and a profound encounter. His trilogy — “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), “10:04” (2014) and “The Topeka School” (2019) — follows the Ben Lerner stand-in through his maturation, from loafing in Spain on a fellowship to having a political awakening during Occupy Wall Street and becoming a father. The books are held together with a voice that is elastic, charismatic, familiar. A classic Gen X voice — relentless and talky, ironic, with sudden intensities of feeling and marked by a terror of fraudulence. Visiting the Prado, the narrator stands in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s “Descent From the Cross” and hopes for “a profound experience of art,” only to confess: “The closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.”
Part of the deeper trajectory of the books is watching Lerner’s stand-in become suspicious of that very voice, its fluency and detachment. “The Topeka School” was intended to provide a prehistory to his previous work, to rake up the roots of his own language (the influence of his psychologist parents, the ruthlessness of high school debate competitions). What might follow this trilogy? What precedes prehistory? Is there more to excavate, further back to travel?
Always. “Transcription” begins with a man being carried into the past, falling asleep on a train. When he arrives in his college town, he is confronted by people he used to know, gliding up to him like ghosts (or is he the ghost?). Is that his wife standing there, 20 years old again, fishing out a cigarette from a bag, her hair tied back with a yellow cloth? Is that his daughter’s voice on the phone, sounding tinny and far away? There are Lerner’s customary touches — characters with strange doubles (the narrator and Max; their respective daughters, Eva and Emmie), who unknowingly say the same lines, reach for the same metaphor. The echoes of Lerner’s influences — W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard — form a phantom chorale. But we are well out of the realm of the relentless patter; the mugging, hyperaware narrators; the churn of rants and gags. There is so much silence in this novel, so much air — a feeling of watching the action unfurl on a broad, bare stage and Lerner taking up a subject that he has circled but never really approached, until now. A novel speaks, yes, but it can also listen.
It’s a misapprehension that literature is inherently threatened by new technologies; novels and poems, themselves kinds of technology, have always been curious about other forms as they appear. “The Count of Monte Cristo,” for example, showcases the telegraph in enraptured detail (and makes it a key part of the plot); the stories of Tagore explore a world remade by the arrival of the railways. And is there a more charming example of this genre than the essay “Personism,” in which Frank O’Hara describes interrupting himself while writing a love poem, realizing that he can just ring up the object of his desire instead?
Lerner has always been attentive to how technology mediates communication; “Leaving the Atocha Station” contains one of the first convincing renditions of characters chatting online, complete with the lags and awkwardness. I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. “Transcription” is a chronicle of that confusion.
The novel’s three sections are each built around a conversation. In the first, the narrator is on assignment for a magazine and traveling to interview his old mentor, Thomas, now 90. Directly before their meeting, however, he drops his phone into a hotel sink full of water. He has no ability to record the conversation, and is strangely afraid to confess this to Thomas. He bumbles through the interview, pretending to record it. In the second section, we learn that the narrator invented responses to his questions, angering Thomas’s son, Max. And in the final section, Max has his word, delivering an anguished monologue of growing up with his brilliant and distant father. The first and last sections are mirror images of each other, in which two men, once close friends, compare notes of their radically different relationships with a father figure, and the reader realizes that their own experiences of fatherhood bear similarities. Both their young daughters have struggled. Eva is beset by anxiety and refuses to go to school; Emmie refuses to eat.
But I spoke of confusion. Note that none of these conversations flow smoothly. They are pocked by misunderstandings and memory lapses. Every conversation invokes another conversation that went even more wildly off the rails. Every character receives a lesson in listening. “We are together, erring,” the narrator recalls Thomas telling him once. In college, a breakdown caused the narrator to experience frightening auditory hallucinations. Thomas had taught him how to listen again, how to hear silence — “we must sometime adjust our antennae, no?” Within such scenes, there is a sense of the novel reveling in its own power of listening, its own antennae. Adjusting it, the novel can register the subtlest changes in atmosphere and consciousness. (The narrator realizes how differently he thinks and sees without a phone in his hand, how differently he speaks when he knows he is being recorded.)
“Screen time” is given a new meaning and fresh horror. Particularly for Max, whose daughter watches YouTube unboxing videos in a trance. He tries to understand the deep, somatic satisfaction she finds in the sight of an object being unwrapped with ceremonious slowness in a kind of bubble. The world is banished; there are only the sensory inputs from the microphones that enhance the sounds of crackling paper, tapping fingernails, delighted murmurs. It is a kind of pornography, Max splutters — how else to describe the compulsiveness and lassitude it excites, its effectiveness in blocking real feeling? These videos are the enemy of a novel like “Transcription,” whose characters have all suffered from a little too much reality, and whose plot resists easy consumption.
I filled pages of notes parsing its symbols and coincidences. The narrative is fugitive and sly; there are great gaps, missing transitions, copious contradictions, unexplained sources of rancor. Much of the main action occurs offstage. Struggling to describe the shape of this book just now, I reached for a pair of tights on the floor, dreadfully torn and twisted. That is the experience of this book, I thought, poking at the ladders; you fall straight through the story, just like its characters. They can’t keep themselves straight — are they 18 years old? 45? Up and down the ladders they go, up and down. Tucking a child into bed, they feel a shock of vertigo, experiencing themselves simultaneously as a child again and as their own parent, even as a future self, recalling this moment.
As the novel adjusts its antennae, it welcomes new frequencies — the footfalls of the past, premonitions of the future. “Transcription” is preoccupied with questions of how and where experience lodges in our minds; it captures all that we knowingly carry from the past (Thomas says of his family, “They speak through me, my accents”) and all the ways that history is transcribed within us beyond our knowledge, how it erupts in behavior and malady (the refusals of the two daughters in the book), in patterns and repetitions. The novel is our great, communal dream, the place that reveals what composite creatures we really are, what tangles of invention, what repositories for one another’s needs and fears. (“I sound angry, but I think it is yours, the anger, reflected in me,” a character says to another.) Can your phone do all that?
Because this is a Ben Lerner story, there are real-life corollaries to be traced, for those addled by the “reality hunger” of the late aughts and inclined to prowl after facts. Thomas describes listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio as a child; it was, he says, like listening to someone climbing a staircase, the endless ratcheting up of tone and rhetoric. His parents were entranced. This description has been lifted from Lerner’s 2024 Paris Review interview with one of his mentors, Rosmarie Waldrop. Lerner became close to the Waldrops — Rosmarie and Keith, both poets — as an undergraduate, and their home shows up in nearly everything he has written, a house overrun by books, humming with conversation, where the door was always left unlocked and the role of the writer regarded with a healthy amount of irreverence.
We return to the house again in “Transcription.” This time, in the kitchen, the narrator notices strawberries furred with mold. It is the second such reference. Earlier, he recalled seeing a moldy strawberry when he visited Harvard’s Museum of Natural History and its collection of delicately blown glass flowers and fruit, the work of a Czech father-and-son team, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.
There is a way of enjoying this coincidence without thinking about it too deeply. You might like how Lerner draws our attention to the artifice of his own fictional frame. You might appreciate how the collaboration between the Blaschkas underscores the book’s theme of the intergenerational transmission of stories and skills between parents and children, mentors and apprentices, the care and lightness of touch required. But there is a third way, in which a glass strawberry becomes a portal, a little door into the hidden histories of this novel. Lerner is not the first to be moved by the metaphorical possibilities of those gleaming glass flowers and fruit. Marianne Moore wrote about them, and Mark Doty. And Lerner himself, in his book of poetry “Mean Free Path” (2010), in which he imagines confused bees bumping against “glass anthers.” There is an entire history of gazes frozen upon these images that Lerner presents to us. It is in that museum, in fact, that the narrator tells us he learned how to see. Appearing artificial one moment and real the next, the flowers and fruit taught him to hold in his eye both the natural and the made, to shift between recognizing “the given and the constructed.” Eventually, he says, “I’d call this ‘fiction.’”
Another writer comes to mind, too, whose influence is everywhere in Lerner, in that play between fact and fiction, in the twinned characters who seem like brothers. He appears in long monologues and a handful of clues scattered throughout. In an essay on Sebald, Lerner notes that the writer was fond of a motif of “crystallized twigs” — branches encrusted in a glittering mineral casing. In Sebald’s novel “Vertigo,” a character describes bringing up one such branch from a mine, covered in crystals; this “truly miraculous object” seems to him “an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul.”
All this, suggested by a strawberry — this deep history of other people looking and thinking, and our own looking and thinking, too, the traces we leave in language, in the books we have loved. (In his interview with Waldrop, Lerner confessed that he began writing his first poetry collection in the margins of a book she had given him.) A moldy strawberry, crystallized twigs — encounter them again and you might recall the father and son who created them; Moore and Doty, who put them in poems; Sebald, for whom they were a precious motif; Lerner, who sings them all; and maybe even yourself; maybe even me; maybe the weight of the phone in your hand just now, or the slant of the Saturday morning light in the room, or the crush and lurch of the subway. What could be more real? Now, at over one thousand years old, the novel has new rivals but no real peer, nothing to unseat it as the most sensitive witness to our quick, crooked passage through the world, of what it has meant to be here at all, in Thomas’s words, “together, erring.”
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