In ‘Transcription,’ Ben Lerner Breaks the Spell of His Mother’s Voice

Anyone lucky enough to have read Ben Lerner’s explosive trilogy of first-person novels that straddle the border between fiction and memoir might get the sense that Lerner, though 47, is still a bit of a mama’s boy. These three novels, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014) and The Topeka School (2019) all have male protagonists that are Lerner and yet are not. They love art, language, and poetry, but feel ill at ease in the world and have trouble maintaining genuine intimate connections with others. Some of these narrators share real aspects of Lerner’s own biography and, in The Topeka School, Lerner even attempts to channel the voice of his mother — claiming afterwards he felt proud of his ability to do so.

Lerner’s mother is still a practicing clinical psychologist and decades ago authored The Dance of Anger which, dealing with the anger women felt within the constraints of marriage, became an instant blockbuster hit. Lerner seems to struggle to keeping his mother’s voice out of his head to hear his own thoughts more clearly. He admits he shows her early drafts of his works and accepts graciously her suggestions for various changes. He felt exceedingly close to her as a child when they would play silly games with each other. One of them, for this award-winning poet, involved reciting poems in which they purposely mangled some of the words.

Transcription: A Novel
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; 144 pages

One senses Lerner is starting to question the healthiness of their unshakeable bond, though he does not say this aloud. But we sense an uneasiness has set in. He seems to have reached a new plateau which makes it difficult for him to keep grasping for her approval, or anyone else’s. He wants to be his own man; at least that is what his new transcendent work, Transcription: A Novel, seems to be telling us. But the journey to emotional independence is fraught with unforeseen landmines. We hear in this beguiling new work the first hints of a rebellion going on inside of him that perhaps even he is not fully aware of.

The primary story of Transcription reveals to us a shaky, fragile, and still awkward man trying to finally stand on his own two feet; no longer beholden to the maternal force that has constrained him for decades. But these sentiments are cleverly disguised in a story that centers more on his relationship with a male mentor and a father figure who never seemed to be able to reach him.

Before going further, if feels prudent to say I understand how easy it must have been for Lerner to fall under the spell of his nominally Jewish intellectual mother. In photographs, she strikes us as being one of those preciously tender and enchanting women who never really learn how to lift their gaze from their children; holding on to them long after it is appropriate to do so. But Lerner himself seems to have finally figured out that there is a cost to all this wonderment and closeness and is seeking an inner peace and self-reliability that is his alone.

It is uncomfortable at times to watch Lerner on YouTube. We are taken aback by his self-consciousness and his unsmiling face — he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. We see a man uneasy in the skin he is trapped inside. This new work seems to be part of Lerner’s attempt to escape, at least on the page, what has held him in place for decades.

Transcription sounds different from his past works; there is a shift in tone and register. The narrator is battling an unfriendly world and easily thrown off-balance. He’s still self-conscious but there is a delicious anger present that speaks to his disgust with past feelings of helplessness. This new Ben Lerner avatar feels older, more hardened and savvier than predecessors. He is determined to figure it out for himself. He has grown accustomed to his lost-ness and is no longer as threatened by it. Memories of the past still interfere with his daily life, but he battles to stay in the present even as things spin out of control.

The novel begins quietly. He states simply “I was falling asleep on the train.” He is going to visit his 90-year-old mentor Thomas, with the intention of interviewing him for a publication. The lingering memory of Covid is present on the train making everything he touches feel contaminated in a way it wasn’t before. He is obsessively worrying his smartphone will malfunction and he won’t be able to record the interview, and sure enough, it falls in the sink of his hotel and, despite having worried about it previously, he feels shellshocked.

He has spent the last days reviewing Thomas’s lectures on the art of translation, though has had trouble concentrating. He has been worrying for months about his beloved daughter Eva who is struggling with some  eating disorder leaving his small family in disarray. He feels disconnected without his phone, unable to take pictures, or call his wife and daughter, and is worried about how to explain his broken phone to Thomas as if this would validate some shame he feels.

“I was offline, a state of exception. When I was walking up the hill in the past, my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of supersensitivity, but now that I have arrived (You have arrived at your destination, said the GPS voice in my head), I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings, analog photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor’s house.”

The absence of a working phone has left him feeling like an amputee of sorts; or perhaps someone with a phantom limb. He decides not to tell Thomas about his broken phone but instead pretends to record their interview session.

He begins by asking Thomas about his parents. Thomas says he can’t recall the color of their eyes but does remember his mother had a far-away look about her. He calls his father a coward. Thomas starts ruminating on the importance of dreams and how frustrating it is when we awaken just before some kind of reckoning. The interview has a nasty undercurrent which confuses us at first. Thomas seems to be mocking our narrator’s questions as if they were unworthy. He wants to leave but Thomas keeps talking as if the power of his words alone can keep him seated in front of him. It’s clear they both have some sort of checkered history but neither places any legitimate cards on the table choosing instead to hide behind their intellectual assertions.

It’s impossible to read this section and not to think about the author sitting for hours talking with his mother, intent on hearing her every word and responding in a way that pleased her. Still, the narrator emerges and stumbles back to his hotel feeling exhausted and disappointed. We wonder why he accepted such a treacherous assignment since we don’t understand the backstory he has with Thomas. We learn there was a time he believed Thomas to be a larger-than-life figure when he was his undergraduate assistant decades ago. He dimly recalls thinking Thomas could save him from the pain, loss, and envy he was feeling at the time, but it seems now he is no longer sure anyone can save him, except himself. Aloneness no longer terrorizes him as it once did. The approval of others, or even their appeasement, is no longer what he seems to think about first. He feels very much like a man who stands alone.

He thinks about what confuses him. Why is the world in such a horrid state? Why does his daughter refuse to nourish herself? Is he a failed parent? Are all parents failed parents? Why are there so many floods, fires, and the new threats of growing fascism? Why didn’t he stand up to his father throughout his life? What stopped him? He recalls trying to become closer with him as a young adult and his father never responding properly. When he told him about his daughter’s troubles, his father muttered something about Kafka and walked away. He thought his father used language as a sort of sabotage.

Again, it’s hard not to imagine Lerner emerging into parenthood and guiltily wondering if his mother used language as a form of sabotage with him; a way to keep him in the fold. We hear vague mutterings about the futility of endless circular rhetoric and the value that might be inherent for a growing young man in allowing them to bask in silence so they could learn to listen to their own emerging rhythms.