The Lights by Ben Lerner

The Lights
by Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2023

In the opening scene of Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, the narrator rues a missed opportunity: “I should have said … ‘I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity.’” This statement is a useful schema for understanding the evolution of Lerner’s writing. There is the cerebral precocity of his early poetry collections, including The Lichtenburg Figures (2004) and Angle of Yaw (2006); then three novels moving from the disaffected postmodern revery of Leaving the Atocha Station (2012) to 2019’s politically serious anti-Trump bildungsroman, The Topeka School. Now we have Lerner’s latest offering, The Lights, a work of both prose and poetry that seeks to balance the high modern humour and socially committed aspects of his work.

This balance does not mean that fans of Lerner’s heady, arch and ironizing early work will be disappointed. The Lights braids high and low registers in the typically Lernerian “splicing” that engenders comical misdirection and irreverent recontextualization. There is slang (“you’re going to get shit on Twitter’’), technical jargon (“vibration control system”), pop culture references (“like a diamond in the sky”), and many other styles and tones from academia, religion, advertising jingles, and canonical literature. In his early work, these seemingly clashing voices are woven into a discursive self-portrait that is at once idiosyncratic but disembodied, distinctive yet lacking a centre, self-consciously ironic yet always on the verge of unravelling into a cacophony of unintelligible non sequitur. The resistance to this dissociative urge is part of what gives The Lichtenburg Figures its youthful verve and hilarity. The Lights, however, displays an intermittent maturity of tone and understatement that tempers the zany linguistic shenanigans. Compare the arcane sniggering of “O slender spadix” with the quiet resonance of “a delicate carnation of the sky.”

Lerner has come a long way “from irony to sincerity”, and it is not only through tone that the The Lights achieves this. Earlier works abound in unexpected metafictional intrusions and formal hijinks. While there is, or was, a certain postmodern thrill to such irreverence for convention, endless experimentation negates itself, becomes predictable. In The Lights, Lerner uses real names for the sake of emotional resonance, rather than as metafictional device. The names of his daughters recur with touching intimacy throughout the poems, and indeed the book is dedicated to them. This is the work of a young father with real concern for the future his children face. “I am afraid” the speaker discloses, “afraid” that

they will understand it or won’t, will see
something they should
not remember when I’m gone, the voice that is
mine only in part must be kept
safe from them.

That Lerner is able to transition into this new mode of responsible empathy is testament to his range and dynamism as a writer. This mature voice shines forth in poems such as “The Camperdown Elm” and “the Readers”. It is not surprising that such a shift involves an exploration of voice: the changing of one’s own voice, once independent, now “mine only in part”, the sense of intergenerational tension between voices (“they will understand it or won’t”). In fact, the word voice occurs at least 29 times in the book.

The other key word, obviously, is light, occurring in the title of the collection as well as dozens of times in the poems. It becomes clear that light is a motif linked to Lerner’s relationship to his daughters: “we named her [Lucía] for / light itself,” “All my people are with me now / the way the light is.” Light is a multivalent metaphor in the book, extending beyond the father-daughter dynamic: at times light evokes the “ultraviolet” threat of global catastrophes such as climate change and pandemics, disasters that “hit the body” or are “scattered in the body.” At other times, light suggests the vulnerability of individual human endeavour, “the i as a candle, if i's are dotted with flame and flicker.” Lerner’s collection is determined to wrest the negative potential of light and re-channel it. Such a hope is what Italo Calvino might have been championing when he praised the “tiny, luminous traces” of poems that “counterpoint the dark catastrophe” facing the 21st century.

How then do Lerner’s poems attempt to reclaim the ubiquitous, ultraviolet light that threatens to destroy our children’s future? The “avant-garde / pieties” of high modernism and poststructuralism with their revolutionary aims of “jamming … the smooth flow of / information” have been reappropriated into “Sarah Palin speech[es].” Lerner is seeking out “a new language of commitment”. The reviewer, however, must beg the question: does this “search for new commitments” succeed as poetry? The quotes in this paragraph come from a poem (“The Circuit”) which ends meekly with “There are people looking into it.” The few weak points in the book are always tinged with this means-to-an-end bathos. Lerner is at his best when producing energetic, enigmatic and resonant poems that “refract light” to show us what we are, “our own / illumination returned to us as alien,” rather than trying to suggest a totalizing solution to the problems of global capitalism. As a line of poetry, “tracking the dilation of new forms / of private temporality into public architecture,” leaves me cold, as does “recuperation of particularity by the normative.” To be fair to Lerner, these didactic elements are rare. He uses high-register terminology most often, and most penetratingly, as satire (“The bruised idealism of the nectarine”), or analogy: “dark and light as modeling tools.”
The Lights succeeds because of its vulnerable explorations of fatherhood shot-through with Lerner’s characteristic wit and playfulness. The juxtapositions of serious and comic, high and low registers, exemplify Kierkegaard’s notion of the Third Remove: irony which strengthens the sincerity, rather than undermining it. Poetry may not, after all, “constitute / meaningful struggle against the empire,” but Lerner’s poems do succeed as a record of a “love // more avant-garde than shame / or the easy distances” of Irony Unlimited.

Bren Booth-Jones is an Irish South African writer and co-editor of As Much Heart as a Vending Machine (The Hungry Ghost Project 2021). Bren’s debut collection, Vertigo to Go, won the 2019 White Label competition and was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2020. A second book, Open Letters to the Sky, was published by the same press in 2022. Recent work has appeared in De Optimist, Lean and Loafe and at Dutch Design Week. Bren lives in Amsterdam. Find him on Twitter @BrendonBoothJo1