Facing the Past

AT THE START of Ben Lerner’s Transcription (2026), we meet a man reading a novel on a train. He’s struggling to read because he’s seated in the opposite direction the train is moving, which is making him nauseous. He uses the phrasing of his young daughter to describe the experience: “facing the past.” That’s how I feel reading a new Ben Lerner novel, because I’m a completist: I’ve read all his books, and, in fact, I’ve read them all in the order in which they were published. This perhaps says more about my age (31) or my specific milieu than anything else, but it’s not an uncommon phenomenon. Lerner is a novelist that many have been watching and following for quite some time. Although he’s technically two years too old to qualify as a true millennial, his books have characterized many a millennial’s reading of literary fiction.