by Derek Neal
I read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, in one day. I started reading it on my iPad at around 7:30 am as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating a piece of cake that my partner had made. Later, I continued the novel during my lunch break as I ate leftover sausage and rice. Near the end of the workday, after I had finished all my meetings, I finished the novel, then I rode my bike home, looked at my phone for a bit, ate some chocolate covered coffee beans, drank a glass of orange juice, and started writing. I don’t feel like I have much to say about Lerner’s novel except that it’s largely about screens and food, so it’s fitting that I mostly read the novel on a screen while eating. Is this profound? No, not really. Lerner’s novel, I feel, is not so profound either. It’s an internet novel, and a pandemic novel, and there’s a lot of doubling (as in his other novels), but it all feels rather lightweight. When I got to the end of the 144-page book—which is mostly dialogue—I thought, hey, this is Sebald-lite! There’s a revealing anecdote that connects previous events in the novel to the Nazis, but whereas in Sebald’s Austerlitz I felt actual shock and terror at the revelation of Austerlitz’s past as a Jewish child escaping the Germans, here I simply acknowledged Lerner’s cleverness. Part of the reason is that Lerner’s intelligence can feel like a parlour trick, and it’s perhaps not surprising that Lerner is a former debate champion, that activity that prizes the appearance of intellect and erudition over any real substance or conviction.
When Lerner’s narrator walks around Providence, Rhode Island without his phone and has “an unusual experience of presence,” he tells us that “the landscape [was] made strange, the stones stonier,”—yes, I thought, we’ve all read Shklovsky, but the point isn’t to tell us about defamiliarization, it’s to make us feel it! When Lerner writes, after drinking wine, that it was like “a medicine or poison,” then mentions “a medicine and a poison,” I thought, yeah, we all know about the pharmakon, too, but thanks for reminding us! Just now, rereading the opening pages to refamiliarize myself with the novel (it’s been a while since I wrote that opening paragraph), I came across a mention of “bare life,” where Lerner’s narrator describes two people sleeping on the sidewalk, along with a few other people smoking and arguing outside a medical clinic. Bare life, bare life…where had I heard that one before? A quick Google search informed me I was right in thinking that it referred to a philosophical concept—by God, that’s Giorgio Agamben’s music! The thing is, Lerner has a defense ready for my accusations, because the character of Thomas—a 90-year-old former professor of the narrator, whom the narrator interviews in the novel’s first section—operates solely according to these literary references and linguistic tricks, and Lerner makes it clear that he’s both a genius and a blowhard. The two are not incompatible, everything contains its opposite, etc. We can play this game forever, but what’s the point?
Let’s focus on something I did appreciate in the novel, which is the way Thomas, who is German, speaks. His English is unnatural and sounds exactly like someone who has become highly proficient in English as an adult, which is something I haven’t seen fictionalized often, and what I find to be Lerner’s greatest strength—his sensitivity to how people actually talk. In the opening section of the novel, Thomas asks the narrator, “You take more coffee?” rather than something like “Will you have more coffee?”. His question sounds strange to us, partly because of the word “take” but also due to the lack of an auxiliary verb or an inversion of the subject and verb; instead, Thomas uses the same word order as a declarative statement. Other examples include, “Yes, but you are recording?” (rather than “are you recording?”) and “It is late for the literal, no?” (rather than “isn’t it late..”). Thomas also adds “yes” and “no” to his questions, and if you look up a video of Alexander Kluge on YouTube (whom Thomas is said to be based on), you will hear his English speech peppered with numerous instances of “yeah” in between sentences.
The other distinctive feature of Thomas’ speech is his overuse of the present simple tense. About wine, he says, “I give it up for now” (rather than “I’m giving it up/I’ve given it up”); about the interview and the importance of recording he says, “Otherwise we repeat ourselves” (rather than “we’ll repeat”); in a story that happened over 20 years prior, he freely mixes past and present tenses, when it would be more natural to consistently use the past tense.
This fidelity to authentic spoken language makes me wonder about the writing of Transcription itself. In the fictional world of the novel, Lerner’s narrator later reconstructs the interview with Thomas from memory as he’s dropped his phone in the sink and lacks a recording device, but how did the real Lerner actually write Thomas’ dialogue? I can’t help but wonder if he had recordings of Kluge that he used as a model—perhaps even reproducing them verbatim—creating a heady vortex at the center of the novel, where Thomas’ speech is reconstructed from memory in the fictional world but transcribed from a recording in real life. It would be fitting due to Lerner’s interest in doublings and reproductions; it’s just too bad the question of how the novel was written is more interesting than the novel itself.
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