Do him a favor–hate this book.

I finally got around to reading Ben Lerner’s new book, Transcription, and it gives me no joy to say: it’s not good.

Sold as a novel for the eye-watering price of $25, Transcription is composed of three very loosely tied vignettes and barely weighs in at 130 small, generously spaced pages. Each vignette is named after a hotel, which is strange because besides the opening scene of the first vignette, none of the action is set in a hotel or is even really related to the hotels named in the titles.

From the titles, the scant plots, and empty gestures at throughlines that never fully materialize, the overall impression is that Lerner sat down with a vague idea, wrote it vaguely down, and decided that was good enough to print.

Do I blame him? Absolutely. Selling a short book at a high price is one thing (“God forbid,” I hear the chorus singing, “an artist makes a living!”), but publishing an unfinished work is another. Transcription is a novel… it’s just missing some pages–maybe 200 or so. A recipient of Fulbright, MacArthur, and Guggenheim fellowships knows better; you can see it in his other novels. He pulled up short here, and I hold him responsible.

I also blame his editors, or lack thereof. The book is crying out for a strong editor, the kind that grabs you by the lapels and says, “Listen, Ben, it’s awfully clever in parts but it could use a lot more work.” Regular readers will recall I had a similar criticism of the meandering self-indulgence of Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, but at least there the writing was good sentence-by-sentence. Some of the sentences in Transcription are bad enough to make your skin crawl. Here are a few candidates for top sentences I would have cut:

I watched it spread, like the solution across a rapid antigen test.

It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”

I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level.

I have to stop. It’s too embarrassing. And that’s just from the first 26 pages of the book. One can hear “the most talented writer of his generation” overhearing himself as such and thinking, “what a good boy am I!”

But you know who I really blame? Me. Us. We did this to Lerner. He has written some great books, and some great poems, and we did him the disservice of making way too big of a deal about it. The fellowships, the nominations, the glowing writeups in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and so many more–we convinced this guy that everything he jotted down was gold. All he did was play the tape back to us.

So please, if you’re like me and think that Ben Lerner is smart, that he is a good writer, that he might still show some promise, do him (do all of us) a huge favor: hate this book.