Ben Lerner, _Transcription_

AUTOFICTION? WHO KNOWS? I appreciated Tara K. Menon's review of Ben Lerner's new novel for the Nation for pointing out that the episode where the (unnamed) narrator visits the famous glass flower museum at Harvard goes to show how convincing a simulacrum can be, even while you remain aware of its artificiality. The characters and events of Transcription seem utterly plausible, and the narrator is again a near-ringer for Lerner himself, but could this very short novel be 100% fiction? Of course it could. Do we really need ti know whether it is?

In the first chapter, "Hotel Providence," the narrator returns to the Providence, RI, where he attended college, to interview his famous mentor Thomas for a magazine. In his hotel, before heading over to his mentor's house, he gets water in his phone, which means he will be unable to record the interview. Embarrassed but unwilling to own up to his klutziness, he goes ahead with the interview. His mentor, while obviously brilliant, is showing signs of dementia and goes off on some startling and unfiltered digressions about his wife (who died by suicide) and detailed memories of a trip to Switzerland with the narrator...a trip the narrator has absolutely no memory of. 

In the second chapter, "[Hotel Villa Real]." (why the brackets? I don't know), the narrator gives a talk at a conference about Thomas, who has died since the first chapter (by assisted suicide, in Switzerland, it seems). The talk is about the circumstances of the interview the narrator did publish after all, which turned out to be Thomas's final public utterance. Accordingly, the interview has gotten a lot of reverential attention from Thomas-philes. In the narrator's talk, however, he spills some beans about the circumstances of the interview (that is, that he had to rely on memory? That Thomas betrayed signs of dementia?), and now everyone is angry at him. Thomas's son, Max--a college friend of the narrator--is, we hear, especially furious.

A lot of the talking in the second chapter is from Rosa, one of those wondering what the hell the narrator thought he was up to in his talk on Thomas, and almost all of the talking in the third chapter, "Hotel Arbez," is done by Max. Is this before or after the narrator's talk at the conference? After, one would assume, given that novels typically move forward in time, but Max does not seem angry and makes no reference to the talk...another little puzzle. Max, like the narrator, has a tween daughter with baffling issues that her parents have no idea how to handle, and Max, it turns out, not the narrator, was the young man accompanying Thomas on that trip to Switzerland.

The Thomas-Max-narrator triangle is at the heart of things, somehow. Max and the narrator are vaguely doppelgänger-like; besides their being the same age and having daughters with unfathomable issues, a mentor-mentee relationship between men has plenty of father-son overtones, making Max and the narrator sibling rivals, of a sort. Neither can quite relax and take Thomas's approval for granted; both constantly look for signs of how they stand. 

Max and the narrator do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their parent; they do not quite understand and are a little in awe of their daughters. To me, this is an utterly recognizable situation, autofiction or not.

So much for summary--I've failed, though, to get at how captivating the novel is. I could hardly put it down.