The Novel is a Laboratory
Ben Lerner, Transcription
Granta, 144pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781803513805
reviewed by Nick Bartlett
One of my friends likes to pose the same question. In which artistic medium, he asks, are we seeing the most radical experimentation of form right now? His own answer is always the same: video games. ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘But it’s easier to push the boundaries in such a young field.’ Depending on how you periodise the history of the modern novel — most academics agree that it begins with Cervantes’s Don Quixote in the early 17th century, others trace the form to the third or fourth century CE with Heliodorus’s Ethiopian Story — novelists today are plausibly contending with at least 400 years of experimentation.
Perhaps, then, to do something truly different with the novel, it’s not such a bad thing to have first worked within a different tradition and with a different form. Ben Lerner started out as a poet. Only later did he begin to write criticism and fiction. What his most recent novel Transcription affirms above all else is that, for him, the novel is a laboratory.
Lerner has never much been interested in plot. Like the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, he builds from texture and pattern. In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the tension hinges on the intensification of the young protagonist’s anxiety as he wanders the streets of Madrid, his pockets lined with hashish rollies and prescription tranquilisers, a copy of Lorca crammed into his bag. Whether he is caught between the walls of his own lies to the girls he is seeing, Isabel and Teresa, or panicking about the prospect of reading his poetry at a public event, Adam Gordon is always spiralling, not yet ‘out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of a small pitch.’
As his handle on reality loosens, and his self-doubt intensifies, Adam agonises (both earnestly and ironically) over whether he will ever have a profound experience of art; whether he will ever speak proper Spanish; and, most importantly, whether he will ever write good poetry. Adam’s despair is rooted in the belief that poetry can only ever reach towards an impossible ideal. (Later, Lerner elaborated on this position in his book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry.) But what Adam’s concerns reveal is the recurring interest in Lerner’s novels with a blending of form, namely between fiction and criticism, and how this opens onto real world social and political phenomena.
Early in Transcription when the unnamed, 45-year-old narrator returns to Rhode Island to interview his ninety-year-old mentor, he drops his phone in the hotel sink. As he begins to freak out, first in the hotel lobby, then on the walk over to Thomas’s house, about how and where he’ll get a new recording device in time for the interview, we notice a familiarity in the rendering of angst as previously experienced by Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station. In that book, Adam self-mythologises about his conspicuous inability to speak Spanish, and we, as monolingual readers, initially empathise with him, that is until Isabel finally punctures his warped fixation: ‘“you are fluent in Spanish, Adán,” she said, maybe sadly.’
Like Isabel, one feels an urge to pierce the delusion of the narrator in Transcription as his frantically mulls his options and considers that to tell Thomas ‘the truth seemed impossible.’ ‘Would it, really, be so difficult,’ we almost shout. ‘Would it!’ Although a grown man can, of course, experience anxiety, somehow its effect on us here is less compelling, possibly because such a trivial problem can easily be resolved, even if it is peak-COVID. Surely, we wonder, this mishap does not provide the source of tension in the novel. Thankfully, it does not. While the conceit certainly establishes the structure of what proceeds, the tension lies in the subsequent attempts to corroborate and pin down memory. Because as the interview unfolds, Thomas shows himself to be unravelling; tears appear in his recollection of the past and at several points he confuses the narrator for his own son, Max.
So ends part one. And you could almost, without missing too much, stop here. The patterning (as opposed to the plot) has, so far, been drawn from Thomas’s obsessive, conceptual ranting. Ideas, words, theories, and theorists, are named and intimated towards with such subtle regularity that the mind cannot help but reach towards making connections that dawn on you even before you are aware of ever having engaged the cognitive effort. We encounter Freud, and dreams, Sebald, and memory, Benjamin, and history, the relationship between culture and nature, art and technology, life and fiction. We notice the strange recurrence of things, like soft metals, particularly lithium, light and eye colour, lamps and lampwork, all of which manage to make intelligible and more concrete the fragments of theory showering down around us.
But in parts two and three, the bewildering carousel of conceptual rumination, around which part one has created its movement, falls away and is replaced by what appears, at least relatively, to be a more traditional ‘plot.’ Part three, for instance, unfolds across a fifty-three-page monologue in which Max primarily recounts the challenges of his daughter’s eating disorder. One feels that while the insights into control, adolescence and screens are interesting, the section’s main service to the novel is simply to tie together some loose ends, mainly about Max’s relationship to his dad and his failing memory.
At his best, Lerner combines fiction and criticism to postulate both a novel vision of the social possibilities of art and the artistic possibilities of socialising. Written during COVID, in the aftermath of Trump’s first presidential term, Lerner’s work proceeds from a distinctively American question: how to do politics when dialogue is usurped, trumped, by monologue? The answer requires more than heady intellectualism; fortunately, this is not the only currency in which Transcription trades.
At its core, the novel follows the triangulated interactions between Thomas and Max and the narrator as they vie for the complete, accurate account of Thomas’s recollections of the past. There is a wonderful moment when Thomas asks the narrator to recount the details of the dream he had while he was asleep on the train ride up to Providence. As he shares more and more detail, Thomas realises that the woman from the dream, the child, the sirens, the streets of Paris all belong to his life rather than the narrator’s. ‘I cannot remember my own dreams, so she visits you,’ Thomas says of his late wife. When the narrator insists that he doesn’t know what comes next, because at that point he woke up, Thomas says ‘but waking doesn’t end a dream.’
What happens when we converse with another person, exchange memories, (re)construct experiences? Thomas doesn’t quite know. And nor do I. But it’s enchanting and heartening, if a little affected, to consider that ‘we extend the dream when we share it.’ After all, politics is really just taking a shot at an ideal. At the very least, Thomas thinks so. ‘Politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no?’ If only it were that simple. Maybe it is.
Perhaps, then, to do something truly different with the novel, it’s not such a bad thing to have first worked within a different tradition and with a different form. Ben Lerner started out as a poet. Only later did he begin to write criticism and fiction. What his most recent novel Transcription affirms above all else is that, for him, the novel is a laboratory.
Lerner has never much been interested in plot. Like the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, he builds from texture and pattern. In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the tension hinges on the intensification of the young protagonist’s anxiety as he wanders the streets of Madrid, his pockets lined with hashish rollies and prescription tranquilisers, a copy of Lorca crammed into his bag. Whether he is caught between the walls of his own lies to the girls he is seeing, Isabel and Teresa, or panicking about the prospect of reading his poetry at a public event, Adam Gordon is always spiralling, not yet ‘out of control, but downward, nevertheless, in a helix of a small pitch.’
As his handle on reality loosens, and his self-doubt intensifies, Adam agonises (both earnestly and ironically) over whether he will ever have a profound experience of art; whether he will ever speak proper Spanish; and, most importantly, whether he will ever write good poetry. Adam’s despair is rooted in the belief that poetry can only ever reach towards an impossible ideal. (Later, Lerner elaborated on this position in his book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry.) But what Adam’s concerns reveal is the recurring interest in Lerner’s novels with a blending of form, namely between fiction and criticism, and how this opens onto real world social and political phenomena.
Early in Transcription when the unnamed, 45-year-old narrator returns to Rhode Island to interview his ninety-year-old mentor, he drops his phone in the hotel sink. As he begins to freak out, first in the hotel lobby, then on the walk over to Thomas’s house, about how and where he’ll get a new recording device in time for the interview, we notice a familiarity in the rendering of angst as previously experienced by Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station. In that book, Adam self-mythologises about his conspicuous inability to speak Spanish, and we, as monolingual readers, initially empathise with him, that is until Isabel finally punctures his warped fixation: ‘“you are fluent in Spanish, Adán,” she said, maybe sadly.’
Like Isabel, one feels an urge to pierce the delusion of the narrator in Transcription as his frantically mulls his options and considers that to tell Thomas ‘the truth seemed impossible.’ ‘Would it, really, be so difficult,’ we almost shout. ‘Would it!’ Although a grown man can, of course, experience anxiety, somehow its effect on us here is less compelling, possibly because such a trivial problem can easily be resolved, even if it is peak-COVID. Surely, we wonder, this mishap does not provide the source of tension in the novel. Thankfully, it does not. While the conceit certainly establishes the structure of what proceeds, the tension lies in the subsequent attempts to corroborate and pin down memory. Because as the interview unfolds, Thomas shows himself to be unravelling; tears appear in his recollection of the past and at several points he confuses the narrator for his own son, Max.
So ends part one. And you could almost, without missing too much, stop here. The patterning (as opposed to the plot) has, so far, been drawn from Thomas’s obsessive, conceptual ranting. Ideas, words, theories, and theorists, are named and intimated towards with such subtle regularity that the mind cannot help but reach towards making connections that dawn on you even before you are aware of ever having engaged the cognitive effort. We encounter Freud, and dreams, Sebald, and memory, Benjamin, and history, the relationship between culture and nature, art and technology, life and fiction. We notice the strange recurrence of things, like soft metals, particularly lithium, light and eye colour, lamps and lampwork, all of which manage to make intelligible and more concrete the fragments of theory showering down around us.
But in parts two and three, the bewildering carousel of conceptual rumination, around which part one has created its movement, falls away and is replaced by what appears, at least relatively, to be a more traditional ‘plot.’ Part three, for instance, unfolds across a fifty-three-page monologue in which Max primarily recounts the challenges of his daughter’s eating disorder. One feels that while the insights into control, adolescence and screens are interesting, the section’s main service to the novel is simply to tie together some loose ends, mainly about Max’s relationship to his dad and his failing memory.
At his best, Lerner combines fiction and criticism to postulate both a novel vision of the social possibilities of art and the artistic possibilities of socialising. Written during COVID, in the aftermath of Trump’s first presidential term, Lerner’s work proceeds from a distinctively American question: how to do politics when dialogue is usurped, trumped, by monologue? The answer requires more than heady intellectualism; fortunately, this is not the only currency in which Transcription trades.
At its core, the novel follows the triangulated interactions between Thomas and Max and the narrator as they vie for the complete, accurate account of Thomas’s recollections of the past. There is a wonderful moment when Thomas asks the narrator to recount the details of the dream he had while he was asleep on the train ride up to Providence. As he shares more and more detail, Thomas realises that the woman from the dream, the child, the sirens, the streets of Paris all belong to his life rather than the narrator’s. ‘I cannot remember my own dreams, so she visits you,’ Thomas says of his late wife. When the narrator insists that he doesn’t know what comes next, because at that point he woke up, Thomas says ‘but waking doesn’t end a dream.’
What happens when we converse with another person, exchange memories, (re)construct experiences? Thomas doesn’t quite know. And nor do I. But it’s enchanting and heartening, if a little affected, to consider that ‘we extend the dream when we share it.’ After all, politics is really just taking a shot at an ideal. At the very least, Thomas thinks so. ‘Politics is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no?’ If only it were that simple. Maybe it is.