In 1993, Keith Waldrop published his first and only novel, Light While There Is Light. The book, which New York Review Books will reissue in May with an introduction by Ben Lerner, features a narrator named Keith Waldrop, photos of Waldrop’s family of origin, and countless autobiographical anecdotes. The jacket copy calls it a “fictional memoir,” but Waldrop maintained it was a novel: “the fiction of a family that happens to resemble my family to the point that I have used some real names” but also includes “characters and details from elsewhere or nowhere.” Though he wrote more than twenty poetry collections and translated far more, Waldrop’s novel, such as it was, remained his personal favorite among his books. Lifting details from his own experience, he wrote, had allowed him “to concentrate on formal aspects” of the writing, rather than on primarily thematic or narrative ones.

This approach to novelization will sound familiar to readers of Lerner, Waldrop’s onetime student and lifelong devotee, who has made a career of troubling the notional border between fiction and memoir. When the two men met at Brown University nearly three decades ago, Lerner was an undergraduate and aspiring poet, Waldrop an esteemed professor of poetry and cult figure in the world of experimental writing. Both men hailed from Kansas, had powerful mothers, wrote disjunctive verse, and felt that living was a deeply textual project, one that entailed serving as author, reader, and character by turns. When Waldrop died in 2023 at the age of 90, Lerner memorialized him both onstage and in print—a tall order, given Waldrop’s titanic literary output and simultaneous disdain for hagiography.

Lerner’s latest novel, Transcription, is another effort at commemoration: a slim, slippery volume that elegizes both Lerner’s aging artistic mentors—among them Keith Waldrop and the German author-filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who died in late March—as well as the vanished century that produced them. But how to elegize people who seemed, even when they walked the earth, to belong to a bygone time? People who, even in life, sustained intimate contact with the spirit realm? I never met Kluge, but I remember Waldrop from my own undergraduate years at Brown, a decade after Lerner’s, as an altogether wizardly presence, wafting across campus beneath a long white beard and dark, anachronistic overcoat. In class, he spoke in wry understatements and gave the impression of having read every book ever set in print. His gnomic poems, when I first encountered them, totally flummoxed me; choppy and abstract, they read like coded missives from the astral plane.

Lerner, I suspect, cares a lot more than Waldrop ever did about being understood. But he shares his mentor’s fixation on the textural dramas—those “formal aspects”—of language. Regardless of their market labels (“novel,” “poetry collection,” “monograph,” etc.), each of Lerner’s nine books of verse and prose attempts to invent a single-use literary form—a new set of generic conventions—to enact its chosen themes and to grapple metanarratively with its own attendant contradictions and failures. “I wanted to stabilize some rules in the manuscript that I could kind of wrestle with,” Lerner later said of his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, a sequence of fifty-two reflexive, koan-like sonnets. (Symptomatic lines include “Only time will tell / if my work is representational,” and “Are these poems just cumbersome / or are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?”) His novel 10:04 begins with a similarly self-referential scene in which the narrator and his literary agent celebrate the sale of the as-yet-unwritten book that will become 10:04 itself; the pages that follow document, among other events, the process of the book’s composition. All Lerner’s writing performs some version of this ouroboric dance; by disclosing the methods and goals of their own literary projects, each of his books dramatizes both the fantasy and the futility of literary representation.

Transcription is his first book written as an elegy, a mode that comes with a thornier-than-usual crop of formal mandates. What kind of verbal machine is an elegy supposed to be, let alone one for intellectual giants like Waldrop or Kluge? To honor the departed mentors in true mimetic fashion, the ideal book should both describe and ventriloquize them, incorporating these writers’ love of slippage and fragmentation, their aversion to cliché and self-seriousness, their taste for the marginal and off-kilter over the exhaustive and august. It should constellate their favorite metaphors and métiers: dreams, angels, ghosts, “apothegms.” It should resist hyperbole. It should purloin language and motifs from their own books and letters, enacting the alchemy of artistic influence. It should alert us to the limits of memory and bend our sense of linear time. It should also, preferably, and wherever possible, approximate the conditions of death itself.

Implausibly, Transcription pulls off all this and more. It is a lovely, desponding, idiosyncratic novel, anchored in a series of dialogues about artmaking, technology, and literal and figurative parenthood. Few books so aptly capture the weirdness of being flanked by two mutually incomprehensible generations—tech-illiterate elders on the one hand and digital natives on the other—and the mental gymnastics involved in liaising between them. Though nostalgic for a pre-digital era—a “deviceless,” antediluvian time before our phones sucked us out of the real world, with its smells and tastes and “silicates glittering in the asphalt”—Transcription is never overly sappy or obvious. By channeling the Delphic spirits of his mentors, Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits: finding the sense and nonsense in natural speech; intersplicing shards of citation and quotation; and contesting the very concept of a stable narratorial voice.

Transcription will probably not broaden Lerner’s readership, as his three prior novels have progressively done, culminating in 2019’s sweeping, polyvocal The Topeka School. Nor does it deliver the slapstick antics of 10:04 or Leaving the Atocha Station; the boyish foibles that dictate the plots of those other books (parties, drug trips, dating) are treated, in Transcription, with more weariness, less amusement. The narrator, who remains unnamed, is older and more subdued than those of his previous novels, jolted out of self-obsession by the demands of middle age. (In his case, this means sending a lot of logistical texts to his wife and talking his daughter through intense bouts of anxiety about middle school.)

Aging also brings about a different, less speculative relationship to death. (Lerner himself had life-saving open-heart surgery last year, which he described in a recent New York Review of Books essay.) In Transcription, mortality is treated less as an abstraction and more as a physical circumstance, a forced migration to another world. In this regard, the other Lerner book it most resembles might be its immediate predecessor, the poetry collection The Lights, from 2023; both are preoccupied with the receiving and decrypting of fugitive messages from beyond the veil. The characters in Transcription are constantly tuning into transmissions from some parallel realm, accessing “Language in mere noise;” “music playing that we cannot hear;” “strange signals” and “interferences” from “messengers, angels.” (I think of Jack Spicer’s theory of the poet as a “radio,” not composing language but merely receiving it—“something from the Outside coming in.”) Language may leave gaps in understanding, Transcription’s characters know, yet it’s still the best technology we have for reaching each other. Or rather: it might be through the gaps themselves that we actually make contact.

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Lerner’s books usually entail some conspicuous acts of artistic pilfering (or, to pilfer a phrase he once used to describe the work of John Ashbery: “deliberate unoriginality”). Leaving the Atocha Station, for example, cribs its title from an Ashbery poem and its fragmentary, photograph-studded structure from the novels of W.G. Sebald, while the poetry collection Mean Free Path lifts its distinctive nine-line stanza form from a Charles Olson poem. Transcription is an homage to Waldrop and Kluge, of course—and it’s littered with the names of thinkers and artists of various stripes—but it might owe its structure, funnily enough, to To the Lighthouse: another spare, restless novel about death, art, and technological change. In the spirit of Woolf’s masterpiece, which will celebrate its centenary next year, Transcription unfolds over three discontinuous sections with a shattering, offscreen death occurring between the first and second, and a final act that blurs the line between an artwork and the world it claims to represent.

Like Mrs. Ramsay pledging an impossible boat ride to her son in the Hebrides, Transcription begins with a broken promise. In the first section, the narrator shows up in Providence, Rhode Island, to conduct a magazine-commissioned interview with his mentor, the Waldrop-like Thomas, without a functional recording device. (He has dropped his phone in the sink back at the hotel.) Bizarrely unable to admit his fuck-up to Thomas, he settles himself in the living room, makes an elaborate pantomime of recording, and begins the interview nevertheless. The reader is given to understand that the dialogue that follows, even within the deictic world of the novel, is untrustworthy: a series of reconstructed utterances filtered through the vagaries of memory and art. Like Kluge, Thomas was born in Germany and has a distinctive way of speaking English, full of abstruse references and “rapid juxtapositions of images and registers.” Everything he says is a sort of poem: “No one ever leaves a theater;” “waking does not end a dream;” “The truly new touches something before the merely recent.”

There’s an additional kind of linguistic instability at play in this section: Thomas’s apparent dementia. He frequently confuses the narrator with his own son, Max; he forgets names and dates; his once-immaculate house is a jumble of old newspapers and moldy fruit. Yet because he has always delighted in verbal games and collaborative fantasy, it’s often difficult to tell Thomas’s senility from his esotericism. When, after the narrator describes a recent dream, Thomas matter-of-factly tells him, “It is my dream, I believe”—and proceeds to fill in the details with his own memories, suggesting a telepathic link between the two men’s unconscious minds—it’s hard to know whether it’s a symptom of vatic wisdom or of cognitive decline.

Cut to Madrid, where the book’s second section begins without transition. Time has passed, Thomas has died, and the narrator has just delivered a eulogy at a memorial event organized by Rosa, a Spanish curator and another of Thomas’s protégés. By now, the narrator’s interview with Thomas has been published and widely read; it is broadly seen as Thomas’s last public statement, a kind of “exit interview.” During the narrator’s eulogy (which is notably never quoted directly), he reveals that much of the interview was in fact a fabrication—that he had lied to Thomas about his broken phone and then duped his readers by fudging the old man’s speech from memory. But when Rosa reproaches him for his deception, the narrator is mystified; he had just been sharing “an embarrassing personal anecdote”! Everyone is angry, she responds, no one more than Thomas’s son. “Trust me, Max is furious,” she says. “You will have to talk to him.”

We do talk to Max, at great length, in the book’s third section. After seventy-five pages of typically neurotic exposition, it’s a surprise to find this final movement composed entirely of quoted speech. The speech is mostly Max’s (the narrator himself can barely get a word in edgewise), and its monologic intensity is manic and implausible, like Lerner’s answer to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. Max is recounting the story of his daughter Emmie’s struggles with food “refusal,” which have brought on a suite of acronymic diagnoses (FTT, ARFID) and unorthodox parenting strategies (unlimited screen time, a house full of junk food). Emmie mirrors the narrator’s own daughter, Eva, in both temperament and age; she is anxious, addicted to screens, barely prepubescent. Otherwise, though, this section seems to have little to do with the preceding novel. (It feels almost like an insert from a different fictional world, such as that of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: another harrowing recent document of child “feeding disorders”.)

That is, until Thomas arrives. By Max’s account, his father had spent his final visit to Max’s home in Los Angeles in a state of bafflement—at the dizzying number of processed foods in the house and, even more disturbingly, at Emmie’s unchecked mania for “the so-called tablet.” Thomas was appalled that Max had let his child so thoroughly “disappear into the screen,” which represented, for him, a retreat from the voice-filled “ether” to which he devoted his life. If the ether is a “field of force” churning with metaphysical contact and possibility, Thomas saw the phone-screen as just the opposite: a barrier to true intersubjectivity and collaborative dreaming. “The dream is opposed to your phone,” he says in an earlier scene, “where no dead or distances are able to appear.”

Occasionally, Lerner’s characters can get a little saucer-eyed when they talk about the ills and riddles of technology. (The narrator of his New Yorker short story “The Ferry,” for example, spends a mind-numbing quantity of words on the mysticism of voicemails: “sometimes I’ll get voice mails instantly when the signal returns, but . . . sometimes it takes an hour, hours, as if the messages were having trouble finding me,” etc.) But Transcription is oblique and disjointed enough that these moments of baldness feel mostly welcome, orienting. And Thomas’s moral opposition to screens isn’t shared wholesale by the book itself, which places some value on “technologies of capture,” including, of course, writing. Max repeatedly suggests that Emmie’s refusal to eat might be the result of “a sense of futurelessness” brought on by the techno-dystopian present with its “fires, floods, fascism” and “need for surveillance.” Yet, paradoxically, contemporary tech is also the cure for Emmie’s condition: It is by planting her in front of a YouTube channel that her parents finally get her to eat. Stupid unboxing videos save her life.

This abiding techno-ambivalence is brilliantly concretized by the book’s cover: a visual pun on the skeuomorphically named “tablet” featuring a graven stele in the shape of an iPhone. (The object is set against a gray void, making its scale impossible to discern.) Is the smartphone just the next evolutionary step in technologies of reading—stone tablet, scroll, codex, etc.—or does it constitute a break with that progression, a threat to literacy itself? The book isn’t sure. In one of its final scenes, the dreaded device helps Max access great internal stores of language and empathy for his father. When Thomas contracts Covid during the virus’s first wave, Max bids farewell and makes peace with him over the phone—something he could never have done in the presence of “his image or his body.” The distance the phone permits, in other words, is helpful, even salutary. Thomas, magus that he is, makes a miraculous recovery but fails (refuses?) to remember his son’s telephonic speech, and Max finds himself unable to repeat the words, desperately wishing he had made a recording. Technology sucks, Transcription seems to say; if only we had more of it.

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Beyond his many books, Keith Waldrop is best known for his collaborations with his wife, the genius poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop. Like Keith’s, and like Lerner’s, Rosmarie’s poems are shifty, agrammatical creatures, often born of aleatory and collage-based methods. Here’s a snippet from her 1990 book A Form / Of Taking / It All:

You say, if this is narrative. Of prepare, I say. What? you ask. A quote, I say. Why don’t you just lean out the window and look at the maples, red, battling with fall, that same yellow dog, the government employees hurrying to the Archives. Never mind the yellow dog, you say. Look straight across the vacant lot: The future is female like most allegories. There she sits with her open book, pulling the next sentence down into her marble weight.

Though similarly elliptical and meta, Rosemarie’s poems are unlike Keith’s or Lerner’s in that they are composed in a language she did not grow up primarily speaking. She was born in Bavaria in 1935, where she witnessed the rise and fall of the Nazi regime and survived the bombing of her hometown, Kitzingen, at the age of 9. (Kluge, born in 1932 a couple hundred miles north in Halberstadt, also saw his hometown bombed during WWII.) As a university student in the 1950s, Rosmarie met Keith, who was stationed in West Germany as a US soldier and who enlisted her help translating German poems into English. Within a few years, the two had relocated to the States, gotten married, and cofounded the legendary small press Burning Deck, through which they went on to publish a raft of experimental anglophone and translated literature, with a roster including Paul Auster, Lyn Hejinian, and Barbara Guest.

Thomas, the mentor-figure in Transcription, for all his similarities to Keith and Kluge, is at least equal parts Rosmarie. In fact, it was Rosmarie whom Lerner interviewed for The Paris Review last year, at the Waldrops’ home in Providence, in a living room described in almost identical terms to the one in Transcription. Thomas begins his fictional interview—as Rosmarie does her ostensibly nonfictional one—with a memory of Hitler’s voice on the radio. Lerner has widely cited Rosmarie as a critical influence on his poetry, and her own “fictional memoir,” The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter, published in 1986, predated her husband’s foray into novel-writing by several years. Is Transcription, after all, a tribute not to Keith or Kluge but to Rosmarie?

Yes and no. To some extent, of course, Thomas is a work of fiction; none of these people was born in 1934, or widowed in middle age, or the parent of an only child. But he also likely corresponds to what the French poet Jacques Roubaud called, when describing one of the Waldrops’ many co-authored books, “the third Waldrop:” the homuncular voice of their relationship, an emergent spirit, neither entirely Keith’s nor Rosmarie’s, who narrates their collaborative texts. (The “wonderful, regenerating Waldrops,” Robert Creeley once called them, as if they could regrow their limbs like starfish.) Thomas is both Keith and Rosmarie, in other words, at the same time as he is many people and no one at all.

Fiction, for Lerner as for his mentors, is never the result of mere invention. Rather, it is what the narrator of Transcription describes as a sort of thaumatropic movement between reality and its simulacrum: a way of seeing life “as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect . . . between nature and culture, the given and the constructed.” Early in the book, while walking the streets of Providence, the narrator remembers, in a rush of déjà vu, a college-era visit to see Leopold and Rudolf Blaschkas’ glass flowers at Harvard’s Natural History Museum: botanical models whose uncanny verisimilitude causes a lasting glitch in his perspective. The flowers appear so perfectly lifelike that, from then on, the narrator can never quite be sure that the beings and landscapes he encounters aren’t also works of human artifice. Life itself has become aestheticized: a text.

Distinguishing the world from simulations of the world, the virtual from the real—it’s a tough job for anyone, let alone for those of us who spend our lives writing texts in the service of “expression” or “creativity.” When your livelihood is language, it becomes almost impossible to tell where experience ends and representation begins. And when you’re a writer famous enough that your own work intervenes on the culture in a significant way, and changes the material and interpersonal conditions of your existence—well, you can go ahead and forget about separating art from life. Seen in that light, the instability of Lerner’s prose is not just a stylistic choice but also a painstaking effort at mimesis; the more perplexity we feel when we read it, the more accurately it reproduces the endlessly recursive experience of being a writer (or at least the kind of writer Lerner is). Here’s a telling sentence from his introduction to the 2019 reissue of Rosmarie’s novel, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter: “For a poet, ‘realism’ is at least as much about the reality of the work itself, its status as a made thing (a ‘machine made out of words,’ as William Carlos Williams put it) as it is about the vividness of the world that the words denote.”

Like a poem, the best kind of “fictional memoir” asks to be approached as both art and fact at once—as a kind of spectral lacework drawn over the world as it is, and through which that world periodically breaks through. What makes fiction fictiony is not some special property of its prose but rather the wall it builds around its own narrative universe, which demands that we regard it as magically disconnected from the facts of historical life. Books like Lerner’s present an opportunity to rethink the ethics of this kind of reading; they beg to be situated within a material context, a collective timeline, and a flesh-and-blood literary lineage. Rather than invite the reader to suspend their disbelief, the author of the fictional memoir looks alongside us at the text in the process of being written, almost as if some other consciousness has been composing it. As Spicer would have it, that’s precisely the case.

In this way, books like Lerner’s also confront the sense of loss and self-alienation involved in all representation. “I know, of course, that while memory holds the shape of the past, the past that is held takes on the shape of memory,” wrote Keith Waldrop in his prosimetric book The Silhouette of the Bridge. (Elsewhere in the same book: “We capture what we can by rendering it in words, but then, whether we speak or write or think, it remains words, never restored, never un- or re-translated except into other words.”) Put another way, we lose something unrecoverable when we try, and inevitably fail, to record our preverbal experiences in words, only to warp and truncate those experiences in our attempts. In Transcription, Lerner manages a brilliant sleight of hand: By offering the transcript of an experience while disputing that transcript’s authenticity, he both shares a version of the experience with his readers and also preserves the ineffable purity of the original—what he calls, in The Hatred of Poetry, “the glimmer of the virtual.” He is like the Old English poet Caedmon, who, upon waking, is able to record only a pale imitation of the mythically beautiful hymn he wrote in his dream. (The song “Tribute” by Tenacious D follows a similar arc.) It’s not quite the real thing, maybe, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing at all.

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Given all that, the allure of biographical reading is hard to shake. As I made my way through the pleasures and enigmas of Transcription, trying to keep a foothold in both the fictional world and the nonfictional one, some prurient part of me kept snagging on the character of Thomas’s son, Max, who, maddeningly, lacks a readily findable real-life counterpart. Maybe he’s one of those Waldropian “characters from elsewhere or nowhere;” maybe he contains elements of Lerner’s brother or friends or intellectual rivals. I eventually landed on the possibly kooky theory that Max is less a “real” character than a figment of the narrator’s imagination: a twice-refracted version of Lerner himself, one invented by the narrator he invented. Speaking as Max might allow the narrator to express things too fraught or painful to disclose in propria persona: his frustrations with his mentor, for example, or the private extremes of shame and terror that visit the parents of very sick children.

Recently, I was explaining my Max-Doesn’t-Exist theory to a friend. The two characters speak identically, I pointed out, from the ways they address their daughters (“How are you, love?”; “just one more bite of chicken, love”) to their tendency toward metaphor, hypotactic syntax, and shared high-low idiolect. Then there’s the fact that Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop were famously childless—their lack of offspring comes up explicitly in Rosmarie’s Paris Review interview and even comprises a minor plot point in 10:04, which also features a barely fictionalized version of the couple. (After developing a crush on a woman he believes to be the not-quite-Waldrops’ daughter, the narrator of 10:04 soon realizes that “of course they were childless; the house had no traces of a nuclear family’s present or past.”) And Transcription’s final scene is an uncanny reversal of its opening, with Max sitting in the narrator’s chair, interviewing—and secretly recording—his father. The last voice we hear is Thomas’s, who has once again grown confused about the identity of his interlocutor. Who can blame him?

My friend had also read Transcription but found it deflatingly cryptic: a collage of redundant speech-acts without much narrative payoff. “I actually like the book more when I think of Max as a psychic projection of the narrator,” she said, though not verbatim. “But your reading is largely informed by Lerner’s other writings and your own knowledge of the Waldrops—in other words, by a bunch of extratextual information that the book itself doesn’t offer up. For your interpretation to really hold water, shouldn’t it be accessible to any potential reader, even one who hasn’t read anything else about the people behind the novel?”

My friend’s point was that a novel should be a world unto itself, replete and autonomous. That the wall between fiction and nonfiction should be inviolable, with no voices or ghosts breaching its seal. But, as Lerner’s narrators are constantly finding new ways to show us, this idea is perhaps the greatest fiction of all. I don’t think so, I replied, quoting someone. The air is alive with messages.

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