The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel

But it isn’t conscionable the narrator making escaped with his sources. Thomas bears a resemblance to, among others, Alexander Kluge, the acclaimed author, philosopher, and filmmaker, who was besides calved successful Nazi Germany and knew Adorno. Kluge’s intentional muddling of fabrication and reality, his alertness to the wit of intelligence chatter, and the mode helium uses photos successful his texts are each features that Lerner has adopted. In 2017, erstwhile Lerner interviewed him for The Paris Review, Kluge was afloat of metaphysical drolleries (“It would beryllium arbitrary to accidental that we cannot cognize thing astir angels conscionable due to the fact that they precise seldom travel into laboratories”), which present sound, paradoxically, similar Thomasisms. A transcript, which appears to beryllium authentic, is reproduced successful “The Snows of Venice” (2018), a hybrid enactment of fiction, poetry, and roving dialogues co-authored by Lerner and his precursor.

“Transcription,” you could say, is the inauthentic transcript of Lerner’s dialogues with Kluge. The publication reworks him—a caller specialty here, a alteration of code there—in a mode that resembles what its narrator does with Thomas. (Kluge, for instance, has ne'er taught astatine Brown, Lerner’s alma mater.) In “The Snows of Venice,” fiction, poetry, and interviews are labelled arsenic such; successful “Transcription,” you’re ne'er definite what’s what. As with each of Lerner’s novels, the publication is formally unstable, “a enactment that, similar a poem, is neither fabrication nor nonfiction, but a flickering betwixt them,” arsenic helium wrote successful “10:04.” Lerner rightly insists that “the correspondence betwixt substance and world” matters little than the “intensities” of the substance itself. Yet, arsenic with a leafage insect oregon a fata morgana, those intensities arise, clip and again, from our ne'er rather knowing what, exactly, we are looking at.

“Penne, Rigatoni, and different 1 that I don’t recognize.”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

There are further instabilities astatine play successful the text. When the narrator asks Thomas astir his Hitlerite parents, a taxable he’s antecedently been keen to avoid, helium replies, “I americium blessed to talk of my family. And they talk done me.” The aforesaid happening goes for the writers of the past, who talk done their inheritors. The narrator, we notice, tin dependable a batch similar his mentor. How overmuch our voices are truly our ain is simply a question the caller obsessively circles. If Thomas, truthful to speak, is his mentee’s invention, the reverse whitethorn beryllium existent arsenic well. Kluge, too, tin instrumentality recognition for Lerner. For it was Kluge, on with Ashbery and the others, who showed Lerner his imaginable afloat realized and embodied. “The young antheral reveres men of genius, because, to talk truly, they are much himself than helium is,” arsenic Emerson wrote successful his effort “The Poet.”

According to Harold Bloom, however, reverence is not an cognition that leads to large art: it leads to counterfeits and knockoffs, to Coldplays and De Palmas. “Weaker talents idealize; figures of susceptible imaginativeness due for themselves,” helium writes successful “The Anxiety of Influence.” Or, to enactment it different mode (and putting it different way, for Bloom arsenic for Lerner, is the essence of innovation): weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having breached their iPhones, creatively recast. It’s a process that involves a indispensable betrayal. Thomas is astatine erstwhile an intelligence leader and a benignant of surrogate begetter to the narrator. Still, successful the mode of galore large men, helium is “not uncomplicated.” Haughty and irascible, helium uses refinement arsenic a surface for aggression, a wont his protégé disloyally records. When the narrator asks if the vigor was truly “always” connected successful the location wherever helium grew up, arsenic Thomas has claimed, helium loftily retorts, “It is possibly silly to beryllium truthful literal now? It is precocious for the literal, no? We signifier literature, not law.”

One idiosyncratic who does signifier instrumentality is Thomas’s existent son, Max, with whom, we gather, helium is not connected bully terms. “He became precise aggravated astatine maine precocious for my forgetfulness,” Thomas cryptically explains. “He angers easily. That is from his mother.” As we soon learn, Max’s parent was bipolar and killed herself erstwhile helium was inactive a young child. The coiled of this nonaccomplishment appears to person reopened pursuing Thomas’s acquisition with Covid. Scattered and unsteady, helium begins to travel unmoored. “You impeach me, it seems,” helium tells the narrator, seemingly mistaking his pupil for his son. (The 2 were friends astatine Brown.) “That I could not bring down your mother—” The narrator tries to close him, but Thomas’s fugue keeps gathering momentum. “That she has to enactment stones successful the pockets, that she exchanged the mean of aerial for water. And yes, that I was distant successful my research.” Nothing makes his region much tangible than the pompous euphemism “air for water.”