Ingestion, Mediation, Repetition, Fabrication

On the first page of Transcription, American poet Ben Lerner’s latest novel, a version of his long-fidgeting semi-autobiographical narrator has been molded into the angel of history by his daughter. Falling asleep on a train to Providence on the way to interview Thomas, a mentor from his years at Brown who recently turned ninety, he remembers that Eva, his ten-year-old daughter, told him that when facing “opposite the direction of travel,” one is “facing the past.” Unlike Lerner, the narrator does not see the wreckage of the bygone piling up and, in fact, worries that he will fail to do so in the near future, craning his neck to look ahead: “My main concern was that I would somehow fail to record us on my phone, or that I’d manage to delete the voice memos when I tried to send them to the magazine.” Transcription is a story of regret and invention, the passage of history and experience and the novel’s capacity to capture them, of “art and life, and the hinge between them.”