Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s new novel the unnamed narrator recalls visiting an exhibition of botanical models made by the father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blashka in Dresden in the 19th century. Like Zeuxis’s grapes, so lifelike that birds would come and peck at them, the models, ‘impossibly delicate things’, challenge the narrator’s sense of the real:
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 nature and culture, the given and the constructed.
Transcription, like Lerner’s previous three novels, is an autofiction about the tension between the given and the constructed. It is arranged in three acts. In the first, a character who bears some resemblance to Lerner is sent by a magazine to interview his mentor, Thomas, a 90-year-old Kittlerian figure who embodies the sophistication of old Europe.
After dropping his phone in the hotel sink, the narrator is unable to record their conversation, which he is too awkward to admit to Thomas. This doesn’t prevent him from publishing a version of the interview (the version we have just read), something which he confesses to in the second act at a symposium celebrating Thomas’s life. The narrator thinks of this as just mild journalistic licence, but his fellow attendees are outraged by what they see as his deceit.
In the final section, Thomas’s son Max, a university friend of the narrator’s, recounts the struggles he has had getting his young daughter to eat. The doctors diagnose her with ARFID – Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder; Thomas calls hera Hungerkünstler. Finally, Max tells the narrator about a harrowing phone call he made while Thomas was in hospital with Covid, a moment which forms the emotional climax of the book.
These strands are held together through the careful accumulation of details and particularities and through the compounding interest of repeated images, motifs and even individual lines. Many are about technology. I have read no better description of the gentle addiction of smartphones: the panicked way in which we feel we must consult them whenever we move from one state to another; the magical, unreal way they eliminate space and time; the anxieties they produce in us as parents (an alternative title for this novel would be Screen Time). Metaphors are of the moment. When the narrator drops his phone in the sink the water spreads under its screen ‘like the solution across a rapid antigen test’, a simile that few would have understood pre-Covid but which now feels like part of our mental furniture.
One criticism of autofiction might be that it abnegates its responsibilities to artistry in favour of mere transcription. Where might beauty or meaning be found in a mode where the usual expectations of the novel – careful plotting, thematic characterisation, a sense of aesthetic ordering – are downplayed?
Lerner’s answer is to show how the facticity of our lives is always infused with the fictional. After his encounter with the Blashkas’ glass works, the narrator begins to experience the world as pulled between these two possibilities. The rose and pink of a sunset might be the result of atmospheric scattering of light, he thinks, but it might also be thought of as ‘applied in touches or stains’. The cracks in a rock face of a mountain appear beautiful not because they represent the blind sublimity of natural processes but because they might be imagined to be the product of some invisible hand, ‘as pencilled, as a history of small decisions’. ‘Eventually, ‘he concludes, ‘I’d call this “fiction”.’
I’ve read this short, glittering novel three times now and found new things to admire in it each time. Lerner is a magician. Even when he shows you how the trick is performed, you wonder how he does it.
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