Beautiful Rules

Ben Lerner once described Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) as a ‘bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’. Something similar could be said of Lerner’s new novel Transcription. It opens with the unnamed narrator, a Lerner-like writer, sitting backwards on a train – ‘facing the past’, as his ten-year-old daughter Eva says – and falling asleep, and it’s as though we too enter a dreamlike state. As in a dream we are engrossed without being entirely sure why, puzzled but untroubled by what we don’t understand, including the relationship, chronological and otherwise, between the juxtaposed halves of this short beguiling book.