The Gentle Parenting Of Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School who also appears as "Ben" in 10:04 , and may or may not be the nameless narrator of Transcription? For some, literary stardom is an aphrodisiac. Sex and youth are a large part of Lerner's literary persona. His first two novels feature a prodigious amount of boozing and womanizing from Lerner's fictional poet avatar. Adam's promiscuity in the early work recalls a more solemn version of Nathan Zuckerman or the melancholic narrators of W. G. Sebald. Lerner's reputation as a literary male writer who eschews reactionary politics allows him to speak with authority about the "the age of angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization," as he wrote in his previous novel. Transcription , however, takes a different approach than his previous novels, all of which attempt a buzzy metropole-inflected autofiction.

Transcription has more in common with the slender, more feminine-coded novels of Katie Kitamura, Rachel Cusk, and Sheila Heti than his masculinist contemporaries. While the first section of the novel follows a famous male writer setting out to interview his mentor in the shadow of the pandemic, the back half of the book centers on the famous writer's granddaughter, who is refusing to eat. In Transcription , as in The Topeka School, we discover the haunting world of children blurring with the rote world of adults. Like the Rugrats discovering the true meaning of Hanukkah, or Leah being haunted by a Dybbuk on her wedding night, the kids in a Lerner novel are traumatized by their brief forays into adulthood.

The fragile bubble of childhood—and the attempt at transcribing the words of a loved one—are foreshadowed in Lerner’s poem "The Son": "The screen is badly cracked and I get glass in my finger every time I touch it. Something is lost in the transcription because it doesn’t have words, but room tone is gained, a sound bed is made." The book links illness and confession, each section an exegesis of a conversation, recorded and remixed by the author-protagonist. The first section of the book confronts the end of life; the final section contemplates the beginning. Intellectualism stutters in the face of the body. The harsh realistic plotlines of Lerner's previous novels have receded, replaced by the comic tragedy of gentle parenting and brain fog.