But it isn’t just the narrator making free with his sources. Thomas bears a resemblance to, among others, Alexander Kluge, the acclaimed author, philosopher, and filmmaker, who was also born in Nazi Germany and knew Adorno. Kluge’s intentional muddling of fiction and reality, his alertness to the humor of intellectual chatter, and the way he uses photos in his texts are all features that Lerner has adopted. In 2017, when Lerner interviewed him for The Paris Review, Kluge was full of metaphysical drolleries (“It would be arbitrary to say that we cannot know anything about angels just because they very rarely come into laboratories”), which now sound, paradoxically, like Thomasisms. A transcript, which appears to be authentic, is reproduced in “The Snows of Venice” (2018), a hybrid work 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 book reworks him—a new specialty here, a change of address there—in a way that resembles what its narrator does with Thomas. (Kluge, for instance, has never taught at Brown, Lerner’s alma mater.) In “The Snows of Venice,” fiction, poetry, and interviews are labelled as such; in “Transcription,” you’re never sure what’s what. As with all of Lerner’s novels, the book is formally unstable, “a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them,” as he wrote in “10:04.” Lerner rightly insists that “the correspondence between text and world” matters less than the “intensities” of the text itself. Yet, as with a leaf insect or a fata morgana, those intensities arise, time and again, from our never quite knowing what, exactly, we are looking at.
“Penne, Rigatoni, and another one that I don’t recognize.”
Cartoon by Edward Steed
There are further instabilities at play in the text. When the narrator asks Thomas about his Hitlerite parents, a subject he’s previously been keen to avoid, he replies, “I am happy to speak of my family. And they speak through me.” The same thing goes for the writers of the past, who speak through their inheritors. The narrator, we notice, can sound a lot like his mentor. How much our voices are really our own is a question the novel obsessively circles. If Thomas, so to speak, is his mentee’s invention, the reverse may be true as well. Kluge, too, can take credit for Lerner. For it was Kluge, along with Ashbery and the others, who showed Lerner his potential fully realized and embodied. “The young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is,” as Emerson wrote in his essay “The Poet.”
According to Harold Bloom, however, reverence is not an attitude that leads to great art: it leads to counterfeits and knockoffs, to Coldplays and De Palmas. “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves,” he writes in “The Anxiety of Influence.” Or, to put it another way (and putting it another way, for Bloom as for Lerner, is the essence of innovation): weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having broken their iPhones, creatively recast. It’s a process that involves a necessary betrayal. Thomas is at once an intellectual hero and a kind of surrogate father to the narrator. Still, in the way of many great men, he is “not uncomplicated.” Haughty and irascible, he uses refinement as a screen for aggression, a habit his protégé disloyally records. When the narrator asks if the radio was really “always” on in the house where he grew up, as Thomas has claimed, he loftily retorts, “It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practice literature, not law.”
One person who does practice law is Thomas’s actual son, Max, with whom, we gather, he is not on good terms. “He became very angry at me recently for my forgetfulness,” Thomas cryptically explains. “He angers easily. That is from his mother.” As we soon learn, Max’s mother was bipolar and killed herself when he was still a young child. The wound of this loss appears to have reopened following Thomas’s experience with Covid. Scattered and unsteady, he begins to come unmoored. “You accuse me, it seems,” he tells the narrator, apparently mistaking his student for his son. (The two were friends at Brown.) “That I could not bring down your mother—” The narrator tries to correct him, but Thomas’s fugue keeps gathering momentum. “That she has to put stones in the pockets, that she exchanged the medium of air for water. And yes, that I was distant in my research.” Nothing makes his distance more tangible than the pompous euphemism “air for water.”