In Lerner’s works, this sense of an extraordinary but intangible connection is what wonder and paranoia have in common.
It’s no secret that Ben Lerner admires John Ashbery. Not only is the title of Lerner’s first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) taken from an Ashbery poem of the same name, but, as Andrew Epstein has noted, allusions to Ashbery and his work appear throughout 10:04 (2014) and The Topeka School (2019). In 2015, Lerner went as far as to declare that “there is no aesthetic experience more responsible for my becoming a writer” than “catching a glimpse of myself dissolving into the second person of a John Ashbery poem in a Barnes and Noble in Topeka, Kansas, in 1994.” This originary scene, resembling countless moments from Lerner’s fictions where his narrators become out of phase with reality, is offered as a tribute to Ashbery’s mastery— the disarming effect of his words directed to “you.”
In those same remarks, Lerner also observed that “some of my favorite words written about John Ashbery were written by John Ashbery about Gertrude Stein.” Later, in a letter to Lerner, Ashbery warmly replied:
“The fact that you would someday be born and later would read my Gertrude Stein review, which I typed laboriously in my furnished room in Rennes, and that you would apply my words to me, well it all makes me feel somewhat dizzy.”
This brief correspondence, shared by Lerner after Ashbery’s death, records a strange line of influence between three poets— an arc which anticipates the curious circulations of words and identities in Lerner’s fourth and latest novel, Transcription (2026). As if traveling on an Escher staircase, Ashbery’s note from the past swerves back at him from someone fifty years his junior, when he had aimed it at someone fifty years his senior. Furthermore, Ashbery’s response mimics Lerner’s earlier tribute. He is “somewhat dizzy” by the fact of being recognized and re-placed by Lerner’s repurposed remarks just as Lerner previously felt himself displaced by Ashbery’s words in a Barnes and Noble. Master and apprentice start to swap roles.
Transcription is structured into three parts and each part is, more or less, a conversation. As in Lerner’s previous novels, it follows someone like but not actually Lerner. Like the Ashbery-Lerner correspondence above, it principally concerns the difficulty of remembering and commemorating an old mentor. In “Hotel Providence,” the first section of the novel, the narrator travels to Rhode Island to interview his mentor, Thomas, an eccentric, ninety-year-old German-born retired professor from Brown University. But before they meet, the narrator drops his smartphone in his hotel room sink — “for the duration of this sentence, it was submerged” — and nervously conducts his conversation with Thomas without a recording device. He also gets drunk on the bottle of red wine offered to him. Their conversation moves quickly and extravagantly around topics from the two men’s families, Thomas’ childhood memories of Nazi Germany, the social quality of air and the senses, and an analysis of the narrator’s dream (Thomas overtakes the discussion here, insisting “but you are me” in the dream). The movements and confusions of this section are principally driven by Thomas’ animated style of talking from a lifetime of curiosity, theorizing, and teaching, as well as his increasingly unignorable dementia. The section ends with the narrator starting to feel somewhat dizzy; with memories and visions stacking on top of his view of the present, he is unsure of what is real and what is fiction.
Part Two is a brief section in Madrid titled “[Hotel Villa Real],” where the narrator talks with Rosa, another follower of Thomas. They meet after the narrator gives a talk at a small conference in Madrid dedicated to the memory of Thomas, recently deceased. It turns out that, at some point between the first and second sections of Transcription, the narrator published a version of his unrecorded, free-roaming conversation with Thomas in Providence as an interview. However, in his talk in Madrid he half-admits to his peers that this piece was composed entirely from memory (and again, there was the wine). It’s a fake, then, a work of ventriloquism. In a nod to topicality, Rosa calls this last interview with Thomas a “deepfake.” Transcription is structured around a meeting without a transcription.
This revelation, in retrospect, places the reality and temporality of Part One under further suspicion. Its uncertainty becomes more interesting. The written account of the conversation with Thomas we have just read in “Hotel Providence” is clearly not the same as the published “deepfake” interview. Yet, like that interview, “Hotel Providence” is also a construction composed by the narrator after the fact and from memory. The story is relayed from his perspective, in the past tense, and with personal flashbacks and asides to the audience. These features mean that “Hotel Providence” is also not, somehow, a faithful transcript of the narrator’s unrecorded meeting with Thomas either (not that that really exists, since the whole book is a fiction) and that it does, to a certain extent, ventriloquize the old German professor when it reproduces his speech.
More strangely, on closer inspection, “Hotel Providence” also contains several metafictional flickers, such as the statement to the reader that “for the duration of this sentence, [the phone] was submerged,” the phrase “unseasonably warm” (which is found in most of Lerner’s novels), and the narrator’s declaration to Thomas that he calls his daughter “Eva in this book” (a book which only exists later, after Thomas’ death). These metafictional moments feel like glitches, indicating that the time and space of “Hotel Providence” is not quite right, that its realism is a recursive, dream-like fiction.
One resolution to this uncertainty is to suppose, as Brandon Taylor suggests as one possibility, that the text of Part One may be “a set of prepared remarks” which the narrator delivers in Madrid just before the start of the second section. This theory is plausible, but it would then undermine the force of the unanticipated returns in “Hotel Arbez,” Transcription’s third and final section. Here, the narrator goes to Los Angeles to visit his erstwhile college friend, Max, who happens to be Thomas’ son. Max was present for the narrator’s talk in Madrid and was reportedly “furious” by its revelations. The narrator meets him at his home in California to discuss their different relationships to Thomas — “my dad was a cross between Willy Wonka and Bergman, if you think about it” — as well as their families and the trials of parenting. If Thomas’ speech dominates “Hotel Providence,” Max’s speech dominates “Hotel Arbez.” He recounts at length about his daughter’s Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), which is eventually handled by letting her eat while watching unboxing and ASMR videos on her tablet. This solution, the virtual consumption of an endless feed of uninteresting but stimulating content, perturbs Max, whose composure as a progressive, educated father is undermined by the crisis of his daughter’s eating disorder. The episode also brings up old resentful feelings towards his own father, Thomas. Their relationship was strained ever since the suicide of Max’s Jewish mother, Virginie — a ghostly presence in Transcription, a figure associated with the word “impossible” — and further troubled by the fact that the narrator seemed to symbolically replace Max as Thomas’ son. More identities swap or blur: “maybe you were the real son,” Max says, “maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger.”
It’s eventually disclosed in “Hotel Arbez” that Max had secretly recorded a conversation with his late father. The two middle-aged men in California therefore not only resemble each other but also invert each other: Max’s successful but clandestine recording of Thomas complements the narrator’s hashed but consented recording from Hotel Providence. Max sought to document Thomas’ voice so that “there would be a transcript,” so that “I would, for once, in regard to my father, have something objective to test my experience against.” Predictably, this scheme fails in the mildest way possible: the observer effect alters the quality of the scene in Max’s view, turning it from an imagined normal interaction into a staged performance, or something like it. Like the narrator, Max senses his grip on reality slackening precisely because reality seems to be doubling. In both cases, the attempt to preserve the essence of Thomas, his character, is compromised.
Moments from the recursive, dream-like conversation with Thomas in “Hotel Providence” reappear in the conversation with Max in “Hotel Arbez.” These returns are magnificent because Max seems unaware that he is echoing his father or retreading the thoughts of the narrator, his double, from the Part One. This wouldn’t be the case, though, if the narrator had read a version of “Hotel Providence” as a “set of prepared remarks” in Madrid, since Max attended this event. The major return in “Hotel Arbez” is the reprise of the Harvard glass flowers: these life-like glass flowers are first introduced to the reader a hundred pages earlier, as a private memory of the narrator. For him, they embody the ideal of art as a special kind of recording device (superior to the smartphone’s microphone) that can preserve something of the world’s “vibrations” and sounds that you, in your un- and pre-conscious, register with everyone else, alive and dead. This ideal of art is impossible and founded on misguided premises, but, as a figure of impossibility, it continues to circulate in Transcription as a shared dream or creeping suspicion. In “Hotel Arbez,” the narrator’s anecdote of the glass flowers returns to him via Max, who relays it from a conversation he had with Thomas, who confuses his son and his mentee. The circuitous trajectory of the memory of these artificial flowers in Transcription – from narrator, to Thomas, to Max, back to narrator – leads us back to the impossible Escher staircase and the spooky flights of return (via rearrangement) that pervade Lerner’s work and which threw Ashbery for a loop. Their resonance grows with their re-circulation.
Transcription principally concerns, then, the difficulty of remembering and commemorating an old mentor in an era of advanced technological circulation. Like the Lerner-Ashbery exchange which started this piece, it stages mildly odd moments where inheritance and influence operate in distorted, warped ways, and where past words return in new voicings.
In fact, we could say that some of the best words about Transcription have already been written by Ben Lerner about John Ashbery. In “The Future Continuous,” Lerner notes how Ashbery’s poetry creates a “sense of displacement” by planting “distant origins,” “missed connections,” and “vanished meanings.” In Transcription, everything — the death of Virginie, the Holocaust, the decimation of Gaza today, smartphones and tablets, fake flowers — feels somehow connected but at one remove, as if their secret were held behind a screen memory. In Lerner’s works, this sense of an extraordinary but intangible connection is what wonder and paranoia have in common. It is also this overwhelming sense that “we,” as modern subjects, have in common too. For some, the mild returns and echoes in Transcription are, as Sianne Ngai would put it, “merely interesting” and a little more. Adrian Nathan West, for example, sees these details in Transcription as “a blurry backdrop to a triumphant accounting of oneself.” This seems off to me, though. Transcription is nothing but the error of “accounting” — nothing, including the self, quite adds up and there is no bottom line. Neither a veiled homage to screen culture nor an autobiography in disguise, Transcription is a recognition of the play of error in sense and the senses; it is a fiction between men, where “I,” “he,” and “you” swap roles.
Omid Bagherli is Lecturer in Global Anglophone literature at Royal Holloway, University of London for 2025/2026.
Article photo: staircase of a building in Madrid, Spain via Wikimedia