This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
The American novelist Ben Lerner, still then young enough to be a wunderkind, dazzled readers with his first three novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014) and The Topeka School (2019). They were smart, reflexive, digressive books, taking in contemporary themes whilst playing with the reader’s expectations: the narrators were easily mistaken for Lerner himself.
After a seven-year gap, Lerner has returned with a slim, ostensibly modest new novel, Transcription. Once again the (nameless) narrator is a Lerner-like writer, who in the first section is en route to interview his mentor, a 90-year-old writer named Thomas: this conversation is expected to be Thomas’ last testament to the world.
Lerner is always excellent on the knots our brains tie us in. Before our man even arrives in Providence, Rhode Island, where Thomas taught him at Brown University (Lerner’s own alma mater), he has an anxiety dream about his young daughter and worries about the interview. At this point, with parental fears and journalist fears to the fore, I began to wonder if this was some sort of AI novel tailored to each reader’s deepest interests.
But the fear doesn’t guard against the disaster happening and may even bring it on. At his hotel, our man knocks his phone into the bathroom sink. “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged.” His device “went black mirror”, and so he has to conduct the interview with no way to record it.
And yet, the interview appears, page after page of it. This is our first indication that Lerner has not abandoned his playfulness: indeed, he has deepened it. Thomas’ conversation is odd: he free-associates from the narrator’s questions and, in one response, can cover his childhood in Nazi Germany, goat nutrition, psychoacoustics and more. Can our narrator’s transcription of this wandering conversation really be accurate? Is Thomas’ meandering so unpredictable that it doesn’t matter? Are we reading the narrator’s own free association?
This uncertainty is no accident: the question of reality v. fiction is central to the story. (When Thomas asks the narrator his daughter’s name, he replies, “I call her Eva in this book.”) It’s stimulating but also, in coherent narrative terms, dissatisfying. Happily, following a short interlude, the second half of the book delivers more traditional pleasures.
It’s another conversation, this time with Thomas’ son Max, which turns out to be mostly a monologue, where Max reports his problems in getting his daughter to eat. “Kids’ eating was just a place parental worry went,” we know, but Max’s daughter Emmie is genuinely cause for concern. She wants nothing, consumes little and, says Max, “It was like some kind of horrible performance art: I’d cut half a bagel in half again, and she’d eat less than half of that.”
This is a form of torture for a parent: “to see your child starve herself, refuse life, the life you have offered”. There’s more, and echoes appear in this account of the earlier conversation, but what it reminds us is that there’s a strength in emotional pull and what-happens-next that no literary trickery can compete with. “You call this fiction,” ends the Thomas interview, “but it is more.” And, in places, less.
In 1995 Gitta Sereny published Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995), her account of the Nazi architect’s life. The book was important, though questions were raised over Sereny’s closeness to her subject. Three decades later, springboarding from Sereny’s work and from Speer’s own post-war reinvention, comes French writer Jean-Noël Orengo’s novelisation of Speer’s relationship with Hitler, You are the Führer’s Unrequited Love, translated by David Watson.
Orengo’s source is mainly Speer’s own memoir Inside the Third Reich (1969), which has the benefit of detail but the drawback of partiality. Still, the account is rich: of Hitler’s rise due to “a mixture of extreme social crises and political messianism”; of the importance of class resentment of the old Germany (“the System”) in Nazism; Hitler’s self-professed support for the arts: “a country exists only through the traces left by its monuments, its sculptures, its paintings, its music”.
Quickly the ambitious young architect is embraced by the Führer and becomes, in the words of SS officer Karl Maria Hettlage, “Hitler’s unrequited love”. To the Nazis, evidently having never read Ozymandias, stone was the permanent record, and Speer was perfectly placed to render their immortality in buildings.
His ambition led to complicity, as Hitler complained about “the onerous duty of waging war on the Jews across the whole of conquered Europe” — rendering Speer’s later denials of knowledge about the Final Solution unconvincing.
As the title suggests, the book is structured loosely as a romance between Hitler and Speer, with chapters titles such as “Love at First Sight”, “Honeymoon” and “Estrangement”. But, like Lerner’s novel, there’s a strain of formal playfulness, too, recalling the work of Benjamin Labatut or Laurence Binet. Just when we are concerned that Orengo is taking Speer too much at his word, onto the page comes Gitta Sereny.
She attends Speer’s trial at Nuremberg — she is 24 — and is impressed by his “charisma”; she wonders “how a man such as this could associate himself with the bunch of mediocrities surrounding him”. And so the novel traces Sereny’s interest in Speer and the close engagement with him that proved essential for her later biography.
This refreshment of the story adds texture, acknowledging both Sereny’s double role and Speer’s own, exemplified in a scene where Speer, drunk, rings up Sereny and rants about his importance. It is “a self-portrait of how he really saw himself, proud of his role alongside Hitler and proud of his current role as his opponent”.
Unfortunately Orengo overdoes it and, later, brings himself into the book, with a needless account of his own struggles including how “it is a depressing, nauseating, disgusting business to get up every morning to write yet another book about the Nazis”. Still, this is an enticing insight into both a willing entry into an ideology of hatred and the mental gymnastics required to live with oneself afterwards. Or, as Orengo puts it, Speer’s book was less a memoir than “a compelling fiction about himself”.
Scottish writer Agnes Owens didn’t get her due during her lifetime — despite her association with Booker winner James Kelman and artist-novelist Alasdair Gray, by the time of her death in 2014, her books were out of print.
Her centenary this month might fix that, with all six of her novellas being reissued by Edinburgh publisher Polygon. You can gain great pleasure from any of the books, particularly Owens’ very funny debut Gentlemen of the West (1984), about the escapades of a young bricklayer, or the more bitterly comic A Working Mother (1994).
But let’s instead focus on her lesser-known novella For the Love of Willie, first published in 1998. It exemplifies her best qualities in not much more than 100 pages. There are two parallel stories: Peggy, a middle-aged woman in an asylum, is writing a novel about her life. “Who will read it?” asks her friend and fellow inmate known as The Duchess. “They’re all simpletons in here, including the staff.”
Fortunately, Peggy is not deterred, and scenes of life on the ward alternate with her account of her early life. When still at school, she takes a job as a newspaper delivery girl, at a shop owned by Willie Roper. The chaos of life in the mental hospital contrasts with the order Peggy is able to shape her life into in her novel.
Mr Roper offers Peggy a job in the shop when she leaves school — her mother is unimpressed, partly because “it’s only common types who work in shops” but also because “he gets the name of being fond of young girls”. Of course, no teenager listens to her parents, so Peggy works for Mr Roper, who’s in his late 30s or early 40s (his accounts change) and falls in love with him.
Or so she believes. Now we would say that Roper grooms her, but Peggy — and indeed Owens, writing more than 30 years ago — doesn’t have that language. Nonetheless, inevitable consequences follow, and the story builds to a climax in a mother and baby home (a timely topic) that is arresting and unforgettable.
The beauty of this book is in Owens’ ability to create such a full character and story in so few words. The banter between Peggy and the duchess (“Cover your legs. They’re like bones washed up by the tide”), the scenes of subterfuge over Roper’s wife, the sadness with which we understand how Peggy ended up in the asylum — all is delivered with concise wit and empathy.
Owens wrote about working-class characters and worked for most of her life before she was published at the age of 58. Whether or not her subject matter or her gender were contributory factors to her being overlooked, the time to rediscover her sharp, brilliant, witty, fuss-free fiction is here. At one point in For the Love of Willie, Peggy is disheartened by her own project. “Who would want to read about an old trout like me, in a nuthouse too and not even mad enough to be interesting?” You might be surprised.
