Ben Lerner’s new novel begins with every interviewer’s worst nightmare

In Ben Lerner’s latest novel, Transcription, the narrator drops his phone in the sink after travelling to Rhode Island to conduct an important interview. 

He’s set to talk with Thomas, his 90-year-old mentor and his university friend’s father, who’s widely regarded as a genius. Without a device to record anything, he decides to conduct the interview anyway. 

While the novel records that very conversation, the phone does not. 

“The narrator is both returning to where he went to school and reliving some of his own memories,” Lerner said on an episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach. 

“But he’s also preparing to do what Thomas refers to as an exit interview, to have this major conversation with a figure of such importance that’ll be the last time Thomas ever speaks on tape.”

Lerner joined Roach on Bookends to discuss how his novel highlights the power of fiction to capture truth, as well as being both an artist and a father.

You mention that for reasons that are mysterious even to the narrator, he doesn’t admit that he is in fact not recording the interview. Do you, as the author, have any thoughts about why a person might not be able to confess that they’re just relying on memory?

Part of it is maybe a kind of childish regression in the presence of this important teacher. He’s so embarrassed to admit that he arrived without the one tool he needed to bring.

Part of it is this weird spell that Thomas seems to have on people. So when Thomas says, “We must start the interview we must record tonight,” the narrator proceeds, almost as if he’s been mesmerized.

The narrator is so afraid of this being the last time Thomas will ever speak on record, that Thomas is nearing the end of his life. If that doesn’t kind of produce this strange acting out, where a refusal to record would maybe be a refusal to accept Thomas’s fragility and his mortality. 

But also, what I was interested in was the way that, on the one hand, the interview isn’t recorded, the device doesn’t record it, but the fiction, the book, the novel records it. And one of the things the book explores is what fiction captures or writing captures that your cell phone might not capture, that an audio recording might not be able to capture. 

What do you think fiction can capture that’s not always reflected in those more “truthful” forms of recording?

This is a book obviously about media, about cell phones and iPads and also older media that Thomas talks about from his own childhood, like radios and whatever, and media like paintings and books. But it’s also about the way humans are media, like the way Thomas speaks through the narrator in order to actually address his son Max or Max speaks through the narrator in order to address Thomas. 

We’re also media through which other voices pass. And when you use a human to transmit a message — when one voice is speaking through another person — it gets refracted through that person’s experience, through that person’s psychology, what they’re ready to hear, what they can’t hear, what they misstate. The significant errors that might arise from human to human transmission that actually capture or actually express a lot of emotional complexity and sometimes even beauty. 

What got you interested in that dichotomy of the good mentor and bad father and how those things intersect?

It’s a good question. I think part of it is that I’ve wondered a lot about the relationship between being an artist and a father myself, less a mentor, but what are the demands of trying to make art versus the demands of being a responsible parent.

They’re not always the same. I don’t just mean time. I mean, as my kids get older, I find myself worrying about them reading what I write. Of course it’s legitimate to want to write things that are not harmful to your family, but in the act of composition, I feel like you have to be open to writing wild things or writing wherever the writing takes you. You can’t just be babysitting while you’re in the act of writing. 

How do you balance the obligations to be unpredictable in your writing with the desire to be a predictable caretaker as a father?– Ben Lerner

In my last book of poems, I was thinking a lot about that. How do you balance the obligations to be unpredictable in your writing with the desire to be a predictable caretaker as a father? So that might be part of the background to what had me thinking about this. 

You mentioned there being a certain irony in some of your work, but there’s also a great sincerity and desire to capture certain aspects of the human experience to have an authentic artistic project. I’m curious about the balance between irony and authenticity in your art and what moves you without irony, if anything?

The irony I’m most interested in is actually the irony that returns us to sincerity. The irony of Transcription is that there are these scenes of failing to capture a voice, like he doesn’t record or he gets something wrong. But my hope is that the book itself ironizes that failure in the sense that the book does capture something. It does record something. So sometimes, irony actually is on the side of authenticity. It nullifies the failure and it actually manages to achieve something meaningful.