The Gentle Parenting Of Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’

Would you fuck Ben Lerner? Or perhaps "Adam," the autofictional protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School who also appears as "Ben" in 10:04, and may or may not be the nameless narrator of Transcription? For some, literary stardom is an aphrodisiac. Sex and youth are a large part of Lerner's literary persona. His first two novels feature a prodigious amount of boozing and womanizing from Lerner's fictional poet avatar. Adam's promiscuity in the early work recalls a more solemn version of Nathan Zuckerman or the melancholic narrators of W. G. Sebald. Lerner's reputation as a literary male writer who eschews reactionary politics allows him to speak with authority about the "the age of angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization," as he wrote in his previous novel. Transcription, however, takes a different approach than his previous novels, all of which attempt a buzzy metropole-inflected autofiction.