Ben Lerner's Big Feelings

In 2024, Ben Lerner was asked if he wanted to interview one of his mentors, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, for The Paris Review. “I was really ambivalent about it,” Lerner told me. “Rosmarie is amazing. She’s a hero of mine. But she’s not very easy to interview, in part because one of her remarkable characteristics is she doesn’t just bullshit.”

That conversation was an origin point for his new book, Transcription, which can be loosely described as about an interview gone wrong. “I was thinking about the degree to which the voice of an author is really fiction, because there’s all this editing and moving stuff around, and so you end up with a document that bears little relation to the actual conversation,” Lerner said. “There’s only an oblique relation.”

We were eating lunch at Il Buco, a decades-old bistro in Noho, on a frigid February afternoon. He arrived looking more debonair than I expected, in an all-black ensemble — sunglasses, jeans, wool coat, and cable-knit sweater. He hardly betrayed any hint that last year he had major heart surgery. In fact, he seemed at ease: The server recognized him immediately (he’s been meeting Harper’s editors there for years), and Lerner ordered, for the both of us, a glass of “something dry and cold.” For lunch, he requested the chicken: a roasted baby chicken from a farm upstate, to be exact, an order that, in its comically artisanal specificity, recalls the opening scene of his 2014 novel, 10:04, which involves the eating of an “impossibly tender” baby octopus that has been “literally massaged to death.”

At just under 130 pages, Transcription is not really a novel but something else — its editor, Mitzi Angel, calls it a “séance.” It’s a hybrid book that fuses the disparate interests of Lerner’s poetry, fiction, and essays into a haunting story about fatherhood and middle age. Divided into three parts, it concerns an unnamed narrator who has been asked by a magazine to interview his mentor, a 90-year-old German artist-intellectual named Thomas who survived a near-fatal case of COVID, in his home in Providence. But before the interview, the narrator drops his phone in water. Unable to explain to Thomas he has no way to record their conversation, the narrator pretends his broken phone is working — and the interview commences.

The conversation that unfolds is some of Lerner’s most brilliant and daring writing to date, a mad, oracular burst of speech — about technology, parenthood, and dreaming — that flits effortlessly between prose and poetry. At its center is Thomas’s hope for absolution, his sense that fatherhood’s eternal tendency is toward failure: “To forgive each other we must acknowledge that these forces are too great. That die Familie, it is a tiny station in a grid. Economic and electric. Or a dish, receiving from space. The love, it must go on forever in both ways.” (Thomas’s gnomic style is partly inspired by Lerner’s friend and collaborator Alexander Kluge, the recently deceased writer and filmmaker, whom he also interviewed for The Paris Review.)

In the second section, the narrator reveals, at a posthumous celebration of Thomas’s work in Spain, that the “exit interview” he did for the magazine was largely “reconstructed” from memory. His decision to publish the fabulated interview, which apparently angers Thomas’s friends and family, will haunt the rest of the book, which, in its third section, gives way to a visit between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max, who reflects on his difficult relationship with his artist father and his own parenting failures caring for a daughter with an eating disorder.

Transcription might seem like an unusual follow-up to Lerner’s last novel, 2019’s The Topeka School, a Pulitzer finalist. That book oscillated among the points of view of Ben Lerner’s fictional avatar, Adam Gordon, a gifted high-school debater; his psychologist parents, Jane and Jonathan; and a troubled young man named Darren. It was also his most conventional book after two works of comic, cerebral fiction — his 2011 debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and 10:04 — that were more concerned with the foibles of a Lerner-like character, a poet, later a novelist (or, as Lerner describes himself, an “accidental” novelist), who fears he is nothing more than a fool and a bad artist.

These novels were lumped into a genre called autofiction, a blanket term for the diffuse, often plotless autobiographical fiction of the 2010s — Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are other noted practitioners — and The Topeka School was hailed as a sort of mainstream breakthrough: In its attempt to understand (or “decode,” as some said) how white male rage in America transformed from an inchoate force into a political movement, the book was more of a classic social novel than other autofiction, which is a genre often critiqued for its self-obsession.

To a degree, Lerner is explicitly rejecting expectations with Transcription. “I worried that The Topeka School might have explained too much,” Lerner told me, “and I wanted to write a book that could let in all the things I’m interested in but around the edges or in felt silences.”

He is now, at 47, among the most prominent writers in America, a man trusted to steward two dying arts, the novel and the poem, even though he rejects the notion of the Great American Novel. “The discourse of the novel is singularly haunted by discourses of universality. There’s this idea that someone at some point will write the novel that somehow crystallizes the American moment. And, in fact, there isn’t one book that’s going to do that. And there isn’t one writer who can stand for all writing or can stand for a generation,” he said. “Wherever I am now, I am not a young novelist. Heart surgery will do that to you, in addition to everything else.” That’s not such a bad thing, according to Lerner. “A sign of maturity as a writer, I realize now,” he told me, “is that I no longer pretend I understand what exactly my work is saying or doing.” He does know one thing for certain: “It’s not a fucking beach read.”