Escapist fictions

Dissecting the Ben Lerner protagonist — Is this the real Ben? — An avant-garde novelist — The Sebaldian mode

Ben Lerner is a highly-acclaimed man of letters who’s written four novels about the daily life of a highly-acclaimed man of letters.

In these novels, the first-person protagonist (who is usually named Adam Gordon) wins awards, gets huge publishing contracts, goes to residencies, and sleeps with hot women—all while worrying that he’s an imposter or fraud, and that he’s really just pretending to be a guy who’s got an authentic relationship to art.

Over the course of one week, I read all four of these novels and loved them. They are so excellent! You might think, “Oh, of course Naomi would love them, because she too is a highly-acclaimed person of letters.” And you’d be partially correct. For me, there is a voyeuristic element to these novels. I do all the things that ‘Adam Gordon’ does, but at a much, much lower level. For instance, when I get a publishing contract, it is not for an unwritten novel, it is not for $500,000, and my agent does not take me to a restaurant where I consume a baby octopus that’s been massaged to death by the chef that morning.

This octopus meal happens in Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 (2014), where the author character is called ‘Ben’ so henceforward I will refer to the author stand-in as Ben/Adam.

Everything in the life of the Ben/Adam character is fancier than in my life, but not unachievably so. It’s like when you’re a teenager or a college student, and you’re reading, let’s say, Bridget Jones’s Diary or The Devil Wears Prada or some other escapist fiction where the main character has a fancy, aspirational job, but they’re also miserable, and you think, Hmm I bet I could be glamorously miserable in the metropole too!

It is the misery that makes it accessible.

The Ben protagonist isn’t miserable, but he’s definitely quite neurotic. In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving The Atocha Station (2011), Adam (not yet well-known) is doing a Fulbright in Madrid, and he mopes through town, going to trendy parties and sleeping with a hot local, but worrying that somehow he’s incapable of having an authentic experience of art. For much of the book, he’s hanging out with Teresa, who is translating Adam’s poetry into Spanish. And, late in the book, Adam discovers Teresa is an eminent artist in her own right, with a substantial local reputation. Afterwards, he tries to avoid appearing on a panel with her, because (he claims) he has nothing to say about literature.

She says:

“Adam, you are a wonderful poet, a serious poet. If I weren’t sure about that, why would I be translating you? When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” She said only my name in English.

This is great! It’s such naked wish-fulfillment, right? Adam goes around moping about how he’s really a fraud, and then everyone in the book is like, “But you’re actually great!”

The same sort of thing also happens in 10:04. In this book, he gets a huge book deal on the basis of a story he’s published in The New Yorker, and he’s anxious about his ability to expand it into a novel. He tells himself he’s only doing it to afford the money to help his friend with fertility treatments. This novel contains several scenes where ‘Ben’ tries to display his good politics, but then he feels bad about it, like oh maybe my politics are fake and I’m just doing this to seem like a good guy, and then the text somehow reassures him that no actually he’s a good dude.

In one of the best scenes in the book, he’s working at the Park Slope Food Co-Op. And he has these complicated feelings about belonging to the Co-Op (a Brooklyn institution where you get cheaper groceries in return for working one shift a month at the store), but he decides actually belonging to the Co-Op is good:

[for] most of the members…insulting the co-op was a mode of participation in its culture. Complaining indicated you weren’t foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on…

And yet, although I insulted it constantly, and although my cooking was at best inept, I didn’t think the co-op was morally trivial. I liked having the money I spent on food and household goods go to an institution that made labor shared and visible and that you could usually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evil conglomerates. The produce was largely free of poison. The co-op helped run a soup kitchen. When a homeless shelter in the neighborhood burned down, “we”—at orientation they taught you to utilize the first-person plural while talking about the co-op—donated the money to rebuild it.

After this, Ben connects on a profound emotional level with the woman he’s working with, who has this complicated history where she thought that she was Lebanese but actually her father turned out to be a white guy, and then Ben walks out into the night and thinks about how complex life is.

If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.

This is the basic Ben/Adam move—feeling anxious you’re a fraud and then somehow exculpating yourself.

Personally, I enjoy this move. What I enjoy is that eventually Ben/Adam does get relief. I see no reason why Ben/Adam needs to feel bad! Why is he so hard on himself? What’s he done that’s particularly bad or wrong? His psychology seems very similar to the psychology of many people I know, who claim (at least publicly) that their role in the world is ultimately a negative one—that they are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. This feeling has always seemed somewhat disingenuous to me (if you’re so bad, then you should live differently!) And it’s nice that in Ben/Adam we complete the circle and see him realize that actually he’s not so bad.

Ben/Adam doesn’t believe in art

One of the most baffling things about the Ben/Adam protagonist is his deep ambivalence about the power of art to touch people or to transform lives. This comes out most clearly in Leaving The Atocha Station, where he describes his relationship with poetry as being very labored:

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music “changed their life,” especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change… Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

There is some evidence that this is how Ben Lerner feels himself! For instance, in Ben’s nonfiction book, Hatred of Poetry (2016), he claims that the experience of wanting (and failing) to be touched by poetry is the essential poetic experience, because it’s impossible to actually be touched by a poem.

“Poetry” is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize… “Poetry” becomes a word for an outside that poems cannot bring about, but can make felt, albeit as an absence, albeit through embarrassment.

I find this sentiment so strange! Ben Lerner has devoted his life to poetry, but seemingly has never had an experience like I’ve had, where I just read a poem and am like, “Wow, that was really beautiful. I felt an emotional experience reading that.” This guy needs to sit down and read “Ozymandius” or “do not go gentle into that good light”. Ben Lerner is making stuff way too complicated!

The will to power

In Ben’s third novel, the Pulitzer-Prize nominated The Topeka School (2019), we get a glimpse of the teenage Adam Gordon. In this novel, the teenage Adam sections are written in the third-person, which allows the adult Adam to show a version of himself that’s a little less manufactured. Oh yes, I should mention that at least three of Ben Lerner’s books are actually written by the protagonist: in 10:04, The Topeka School, and his fourth novel, Transcription (2026), the conceit is you’re actually reading a text that was written by the Ben/Adam character.

Anyway, in The Topeka School, the main thing you learn about the teenage Adam is that this kid has an incredible will to power! He just wants to win. Apparently teenage Adam was a debate champion (a trait he shares with the teen Ben Lerner), and you learn all about his debate prep and his anxieties over debate. When adult Adam talks about his own writing, he often seems very hesitant, like he’s a fraud. But teenage Adam (at least as described by adult Adam) is much more confident. He knows that he is a great debater—he just wants to be the best debater. And he works very hard to achieve that goal.

Teenage Adam also really wants to be popular and to sleep with pretty girls, and he accomplishes those aims too. And then when he is sleeping with a girl, he worries about being the best at that, and (in adult Adam’s telling) he prides himself on being the best cunnilinguist amongst all the teenage boys in Topeka, Kansas:

He could hardly have been the only boy who “ate pussy” in Topeka, but he might have been the only kid in the class of ’97 who read up on techniques, consulted the famous sexpert when she passed through town, who solicited frank feedback from his partner in the act.

Of course, he also claims that he is ashamed of being so good at oral:

If all he knew was to listen and respond and hold steady through the shaking, that was more than enough—combined with straight fucking—to make Amber declare him by far the greatest of her many lovers. But while he hoped she publicized this ranking, he didn’t want her divulging the centrality of oral stimulation, which would put his reputation at risk among the types. Again his tongue was both his strength and weakness.

This kind of back-handed bragging is so typical of Ben/Adam! He knows that he should be proud of something, but somehow he’s not proud of it, which allows him to brag publicly about how he’s actually so ashamed of this achievement.

How real is Ben/Adam?

Basically, to enjoy Ben Lerner’s work, you need to be charmed by this sort of thing. I personally found him very likable and appealing, if (at times) a bit strange. Hidden beneath this self-effacing interior there is obviously an incredible will to power, it’s unclear whether Ben/Adam really believes he is the best poet and lover, but he definitely wants other people to think he is!

Now there is also a deeper question, which is…to what extent does this Ben/Adam character represent Ben Lerner himself? I think the answer depends in part on the degree to which you think a ‘self’ really exists.

My personal belief is that the ‘self’ can never truly communicated in full within a novel. The person, Ben Lerner, must contain multitudes, whereas the Ben/Adam character is actually a fairly simple and one-note portrayal. Ben/Adam really wants to be a good person, and he worries that he is not good. But it is precisely his worrying that demonstrates his goodness.

At times I wondered if there was something fake about this portrayal. Ben/Adam never does anything that would truly test my belief that he’s a good person. It’s not that I think Ben/Adam and Ben Lerner are the same, but if they were the same—if all of Ben/Adam and Lerner’s thoughts and actions were the same—it wouldn’t change my judgement of Lerner. I wouldn’t feel Lerner, the person, had anything to be ashamed of.

There’s something a bit remarkable about this. You have a fictional character that you’ve created. You have so much fun here if you want. Ben/Adam can cheat on his wife. He can get whisper catty comments to himself, where he calls out his peers as talentless hacks. He can cheat on his taxes, plagiarize assignments, or just do anything that you want. But…he doesn’t. His misbehavior is so mild that it’s hardly worth remarking upon. The worst thing he did in all four books was that at one point in 10:04 he gets blind drunk and hits on his best friend. I thought, “Oh yeah, this is the juice! She will get upset.” But she doesn’t get particularly upset—she just fends him off, and they begin a sexual relationship later, when he’s sober.

Just bad enough

Contrast this to Knausgaard, who also wrote a fictional portrayal of himself. But the Knausgaard character in My Struggle does all kinds of shameful things, including cheating on his girlfriends, getting extremely drunk, and (as we learn in the final volume) driving his wife to a mental breakdown through his writing (and then writing about the breakdown!)

Sometimes I wished that Ben Lerner could’ve pushed the envelope a bit more, revealed a bit more, and done more to mess with his good-guy image.

But, if he’d done that, then I might no longer think he was a good guy!

So it’s a paradox. If he’s anything like Ben/Adam, then Ben’s primary drive is to be seen as a good person. And right now, I do think Ben is a good person, because I equate him with Ben/Adam (who is a good person). But if Ben/Adam was any worse, then I would no longer think the Ben and Ben/Adam were the same, so I’d no longer be certain if Ben was good.

In these books, Ben is exploring how bad it’s possible for a man to be without losing his reputation for being a good person. The Ben/Adam character does plenty that’s discreditable, but it’s always just enough that he seems authentic, and yet not so much that we think “Wow, he went too far!”

Whatever comes after post-modernism

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that Ben Lerner is avant-garde. This man does not write normal novels, or what Benjamin Kunkel called ‘the perennial novel’. Instead, Lerner is writing in that other tradition of novel-writing, which Kunkel describes in the following way:

[T]here plainly exists, under whatever name, a culture of novel writing, formerly [called] modern and now postmodern, that does not take the form for granted, that does not behave simply as comes naturally, that instead finds in the artifice of the novelist’s art an occasion for debilitating self-consciousness or freedom from constraint.

Lerner’s novels do not feel like traditional novels. It’s hard to explain the way they they’re different from regular novels, but I will try. Basically, there are these new novel-writing techniques these days where you tell fictional stories in a purposefully aimless and meandering way, often sticking close to the details of your own life, in order to create the illusion of verisimilitude. The idea here is that real life doesn’t look much like a story: real life doesn’t have slowly-heightening tension or overt conflict.

The Sebaldian mode

The main influence here is W.G. Sebald, a German writer who also wrote in this casual, seeming-unstructured way. The conceit is that you use a style that outwardly resembles a memoir or reminiscence, and precisely because the story is so woolly and unstructured, it feels like these events actually happened.

For instance, if I was telling you about my day, and I said something like, “My student accused me of harassing them, but they’re lying—they have a grudge against me because I failed them” then that would sound like a story.

But if I said instead, “My student came in today and they were weirdly agitated, not making much sense, and after they left I sent an email about them to the counseling service” then that would sound more like real life.

And the incidents in Lerner’s novels are much more like the second incident (indeed, there is a scene with an agitated student just like this in 10:04). The books are full of strange one-off incidents—characters who creep into the narrative, take center stage, and then disappear, without us ever learning more about them.

The effect is really engaging, because it feels like you’re witnessing the kinds of quotidian moments that normally get left out of stories. And if you’re reading quickly, absorbed in the text, you don’t notice—or don’t allow yourself to notice—that you’re seeing a version of everyday life that’s subtly crafted engage your interest. It’s like reality, if reality was actually interesting.

The best Sebalds

I read a ton of W.G. Sebald a month ago, and that’s why I started reading Lerner. I read all of Sebald’s books, and the two I liked most were his middle novels, The Emigrants (1992) and The Rings of Saturn (1996).

Of these, The Emigrants is the best. This book is told in the first-person, and the conceit is that the narrator (who we assume is Sebald himself) is just relating the life-stories of four people he knows who emigrated from their home countries. In each case, he rounds out the story by describing how he found their notebooks or read their letters or tracked down their relatives, and he also intersperses the narrative with photos that he purports to be the person in question or their home. All fictional! But the text expends a massive amount of effort to create the effect of real reportage, and most people assume that the stories being related are about real people. Even knowing that the stories were fictional, they still felt very real to me.

There has been so much written about Sebald—he is one of the most important writers of the last thirty years and has been a huge influence on contemporary American literature. All of these contemporary books that mix fact and fiction in various ways—they’re often (though not always) using techniques lifted from Sebald. He is well worth reading!

The best was last

Ben’s latest novel, Transcription, came out just a few months ago and was the subject of a lot of discussion. The consensus seemed to be that Transcription, while good, wasn’t his best work.

I disagree! I felt like the book was his best novel yet. I really loved it.

Okay, so the conceit of this novel is that Adam Gordon is going to do an interview with his mentor, Thomas. But Adam drops his phone in the toilet and is unable to record the interview. Meanwhile Thomas has dementia and doesn’t realize Adam is not recording, so Thomas just starts the interview, and Adam lets him talk.

In the second part of novel, Adam travels for an event where he pays tribute on stage to Thomas, who is now deceased, and Adam reveals that part of Thomas’s final interview (i.e. the interview we just read) was reconstructed partly from memory. One of Adam’s friends is really mad at him about this, and she says that means the interview was basically fictional!

Then, in the third part, Adam goes and talks to Thomas’s son, Max (who is also Adam’s friend from college), and Max tells a long story about how his daughter has an eating disorder—it’s this new kind of eating disorder, ARFID, that afflicts prepubescent kids, where they just stop eating and won’t explain why. And Max describes how they eventually got this girl to eat by getting her to watch YouTube videos—unlimited screen time! And then while YouTubing she would unconsciously snack, and that’s how she got better.

The novel hinges upon the contrast between Thomas and his granddaughter, the girl with the eating disorder. Thomas hates smartphones, refuses to use one. But he’s also extremely disconnected and has little relationship with his son. In the interview, Thomas comes across as very avoidant—he just starts talking about random facts and reminiscences, skipping around, never touching on the topic at hand. He has devoted his life to art, and it felt him empty, unable to connect with people. His wife committed suicide. He sent his son off to boarding schools and hardly knows him.

Max describes how his dad always refused to talk about anything serious:

Adelle had a cancer scare at one point; I told him we were waiting to get the biopsy back, that I was terrified, that I was spinning out, imagining the worst, etc. ‘Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed. He was born in what is now Spain, Andalusia. I have walked down the street named for him in Córdoba.’ He might throw in an ‘all will be well,’ but my whole life he would meet anything personal with some demonstration of arcane knowledge or lyrical improvisation. It was always this way, no doubt it was his defense mechanism.”

It’s funny because this type of rhetorical performance is exactly what we’ve witnessed in the first section! This is exactly how Thomas would act—it reframes the entire first section. Now we can see that it wasn’t necessarily an artist displaying his dazzling erudition, it could also be read as a vacuous windbag, spewing empty profundities.

So Thomas, the artist who hates screens, comes across as empty and lifeless, and meanwhile his granddaughter is literally restored to life by the screen, by YouTube. You see, in Max’s telling, how YouTube is so effortlessly absorbing, how it can give this girl everything that art cannot give the grandfather—that YouTube doesn’t need to explain itself, because it is so clearly, obviously compelling right from the get-go.

Transcription is a subtle performance. Unlike in Lerner’s previous novels, Lerner really leaves open his intentions and doesn’t say exactly what things mean. We know that the interview we’ve seen was fictionalized, and we are told, initially, that it’s a tribute. But after we hear Max’s description of his dad, we start to wonder if maybe the interview was a hit-job, an assassination. Maybe Adam, in writing down this rambling, free-associative interview (and publishing it after Thomas was dead and couldn’t respond) was taking his mentor to task and satirizing him.

To me, this novel felt like it replayed a lot of Lerner’s insecurities about the meaning and durability of art, but did so in a more ambiguous and much more powerful way. I loved it.

Which are the best Lerners?

One of the fun things people like to do with Ben Lerner is rank his various novels. My ranking, from best to worst is:

1. Transcription

2. The Topeka School

3. Leaving The Atocha Station

4. 10:04

Many people think 10:04 and Atocha are his best novels. I disagree. I think they’re both flawed, and for similar reasons. Atocha’s last third is marred by the Madrid train bombings, which add a lot of hustle and bustle to the book for no end—the terror attack feels random and out of place. And in 10:04, there’s a lot of cringe-inducing attempts to show how great a guy Adam is: he cooks dinner for an Occupy protester; he gives his best friend money to get pregnant; he mentors Roberto, the undocumented child. It’s just too much!

Nonetheless, all the books are good, and I feel like if you’re gonna read them, you should probably read them in order of publication (i.e. start w Atocha, then do 10:04, then Topeka, then Transcription).

Sometimes, with a writer like Ben Lerner, there is a temptation to say, “Who is this for? What is the market for these insular novels about the daily life of a writer?” But obviously the primary market is other writers. The world contains many writers and aspiring writers, and we tend to read lots of books. We like to read about ourselves, just like everyone else does.

Of course there are lots of books about the writing life. But most of them portray writers who are poor, envious, and resentful. Ben Lerner’s novels are different. His protagonist is full of self-doubt, but he’s also constantly being feted and praised. Moreover, we are purposefully led to belief that this protagonist’s life is reflective of the material reality of Ben’s own life. Reading about this beautiful, glossy writer lifestyle would be enjoyable even on its own. Even if these novels were nothing more than a peek into the life of a successful literary writer, that would be reason enough to read them.

But the great thing is that Ben Lerner’s novels are not mere escapism! No, he is a widely-praised avant-garde novelist who has been nominated for the Pulitzer and has received a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. So when we read Lerner, we’re not only getting an enjoyable glimpse into the life of highly successful writer, we are also expanding our taste by reading a set of novels that are purportedly at the cutting-edge of literary art.

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The Age of Sebald

Last year, I read four F. Scott Fitzgerald story collections and re-read most of his novels, but I never wrote a post about him. I loved him too much! I just couldn’t think of what to say.

Now I’m in the same situation with W.G. Sebald. I’ve read his four novels and his major nonfiction book, On The Natural History of Destruction. I really loved his work, but what is there to say? He’s one of the most important novelists of the past forty years—he’s had a broad and far-ranging influence on literature in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Many of the most-acclaimed contemporary Anglophone writers—Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, Garth Greenwell, Ben Lerner—were inspired by Sebald.

So instead of letting Sebald hang over my head, I am declaring bankruptcy. I have nothing to say, other than that you should probably read him.

My favorite of his books, as I mentioned above, was The Emigrants. It is a series of four portraits of people who fled their home countries.

His third book is also good: The Rings of Saturn purports to be a description of a walking tour of Suffolk, a county in the east of England. The first-person narrator walks around a curiously barren landscape, relating stories about the places he encounters along the way (so many abandoned mansions and forts!) In addition to the techniques he uses to build verisimilitude, there is a gloomy, Romantic affect to Sebald that is quite compelling.

What makes Sebald work so well, in these two books, is that he’s telling the kinds of stories that you wouldn’t tell unless they were true. Like one of the stories in The Emigrants is about his former landlord, a doctor named Henry Selwyn. You learn that long ago, before WWI, Henry had a close relationship with an alpine tour guide (the implication is that they were lovers), but the relationship was cut short by the war. Then, some years after the narrator moves out of his apartment, he discovers that Henry has killed himself. And that’s it! That’s the story!

This is a fictional story! It never happened! But it’s so misshapen and woolly that it feels true, because if you were going to make up a story like this, you’d probably give it more of a plot.

In my opinion, Sebald’s final novel, Austerlitz, doesn’t work nearly as well as the two previous books, because it’s got too much shape—it feels too much like a novel.

Two of Sebald’s novels, The Emigrants and Austerlitz, concern the ways that the memory of the Holocaust has been repressed in the contemporary German psyche. His book-length essay, On The Natural History of Destruction, concerns the memory of another tragedy: the allied bombing of Germany during WWII, and the ways the memory of this calamity has also been repressed. I also found this book to be quite fascinating—it was interesting to see Sebald write in his own voice, rather than in that of his fictional alter-ego. His nonfiction voice is actually quite different, much more direct. I recommend it both for the contrast and as an interesting work in its own right.