Punchline Aesthetics: Recuperated Failure in the Novels of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti

I had been a small-time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems. I wanted my "work" to take on the United States of Bush, to shed its scare quotes, and I wanted, after I self-immolated on the Capitol steps or whatever [. . .] everybody everywhere to read my poems, shatter storefronts, etc.

— Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy. If with this play the oil crisis is merely averted [. . .] I will weep into my oatmeal. If this play does anything short of announcing the arrival of the next [. . .] messiah — I will shit into my oatmeal.^⁠

— Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

Literary critics have competing ideas about what so conspicuously unites the novels of Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner: are their novels künstlerroman, chronicling an artist's development?1 Or "novels of commission," novels about "wanting-to-write"?2 Self-help or how-to narratives?3 The fictional essay4 or essayistic fiction?5 A renewed sincerity (or "New Sincerity") in fiction?6 Or North American autofiction?7 And why are their shared categorizations both so widely noted and yet so hard to precisely and unanimously pin down?

The epigraphs to my essay are found halfway through both writers' first so-called künstlerroman. While both of these quotations support all the above categorizations that critics have given these novels, they also immediately demonstrate both writers' aesthetic strategy: their protagonist's self-narration rises in intensity and desperation until it lands on an outrageous and bathetic comic register of "self-immolation" and "shattered storefronts" and "shit." While scholarship on Lerner and Heti has been preoccupied with which subgeneric iteration of the novel these writers have together renovated, such scholarship rarely focuses on the formal qualities that link their novels: Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner both use punchlines to narrate their fictional selves' failures. As these brief examples show, both narrators resolve their embarrassing desperation to be appreciated as artists by having their reading audience laugh at their desperation and the ridiculous narrative turns it produces. The punchline, as a formal narrative feature, reframes their failure, moving a narrative predicament from seriousness to play. In the case of Heti's and Lerner's narrators, punchlines resolve personal failure through the formal recuperation of comic deflation.

What is presented as immaturity and absurdity by their narrators is, through the craft of Lerner and Heti, a meta-technique that aids a provocative resolution to the self-conscious dilemmas of their own aesthetic projects. Heti and Lerner blur the lines between their writerly and fictional selves, framing their lives and artistic failures through the deflating mechanics of punchlines in order to produce an aesthetic project that humorously, charmingly and ironically counteracts that aesthetic failure. Consequently, in a manner parallel to their narrators, these novelists frame their own failures to live up to social, artistic, and generic expectations as a means of also fulfilling them. By aestheticizing acts of artistic and social failure through deflation, these novelists provocatively challenge aesthetic and social norms, questioning what "art" and "artists" are assumed to be. Yet, this strategy also risks reinforcing the very social, artistic, and generic expectations these novels joke about, as well as the classed and racialized assumptions that undergird them. In other words, by employing narrators who comically perform their failure to be read by "everyone," to "save the world," Heti and Lerner risk reinforcing a distinctly racially- and class-coded fantasy: one's art is legitimate when it is recognized as socially-efficacious by elite and white audiences. This is a risk that Heti's and Lerner's novels gradually acknowledge.

In this essay, I use Lerner's and Heti's novels to theorize what I call "punchline aesthetics," a broad contemporary phenomenon used to deal with certain kinds of failure often racialized as "white" and socially-coded as culturally elite. First, I am devoted to calling this "punchline aesthetics" because it immediately emphasizes the contradictions implicit in this style: conspicuous punchlines, those that broadcast themselves as punchlines, tend to highlight the construction of the comedic routine in a hackneyed way — and are thus a counterintuitive means to produce traditional aesthetic experiences of beauty, sublimity, or, at the very least, profundity. Punchline aesthetics is therefore a paradoxical style whose very form strategically dredges up the failure it attempts to deal with. From contemporary stand-up comics' television shows featuring their fictionalized personal lives to the late-aughts internet abbreviation "FML" (Fuck My Life), punchline aesthetics uses self-deprecating performances of failure to ameliorate the possibility for failure — effectively doubling down on immaturity, ineptitude, and inadequacy in order to turn the serious and shameful into the playful and endearing. Punchline aesthetics is most often deployed in situations where "failure" cannot be aestheticized in any grave or somber manner without signaling its own solipsism or immaturity and thus risk further failing. As this essay will show, punchline aesthetics are often deployed in racially marked situations that implicitly figure whiteness as a deficit or a lack. These situations of self-perceived failure by white cultural elites are not only moments in which a markedly white character anticipates rejection or disapproval by a markedly white social milieu, but are instantiations of what Ocean Vuong has referred to as "the failure within whiteness to see itself, name itself, and, ultimately, confront itself."8 Punchlines are always deployed toward and operate through the specific context of an audience's identification; correspondingly, punchlines here are deployed not only to deal with failure that is ascribed by white-coded social scripts surrounding what art and artists should be, but are also deployed in moments where such failure ties itself in knots trying to see beyond itself — when whiteness and artistic elitism cannot directly confront what is so "white" or elite about expecting one's art to be read by everyone, catalyze "shatter[ed] storefronts," and ultimately "save the world."

In explicating their shared formal characteristics, this essay will begin by describing how Heti and Lerner position themselves publicly as novelists — or, rather, as non-novelists. Their shared public personas and styles distinguish them from other so-called autofiction writers, particularly those that are not white or North American. I will then show the mechanics of their "punchline aesthetics" — how their punchlines play on and challenge social scripts surrounding, among other things, art, artists, and artistic legitimacy. Yet, their methods of challenging such social expectations also risk reinforcing them: when readers take their comic deflation and self-deprecation as imitable therapeutic practices, they miss the critical possibilities in these writers' shared style. The end of this essay will highlight how Heti and Lerner are self-conscious about their use of punchline aesthetics, the risks it runs, and the troublesome ways in which this style has been received. In their most recent novels, these writers signal their awareness of the problems of punchline aesthetics, moving away from it. But what punchline aesthetics is able to do — and not do — is made more conspicuous by its absence. Indeed, their more recent novels bring into relief why the similarities between Lerner's and Heti's work are both so universally noted and so difficult to pin down: punchline aesthetics works, and thus it flies under critics' radar. In other words, punchline aesthetics successfully deflates the expectation that art is legitimate only when it "does" something — and thus it makes a space for its own aesthetic practice.

1. Failing to Write Novels

Heti and Lerner both publicly position themselves as novelists who have been wary of being labeled "novelists" (in the case of Lerner),9 or who are apprehensive about traditional novel forms (in the case of Heti),10 and who are dissatisfied with the category most frequently applied to their work, "autofiction."11 Often they haven't even intended to write "novels."12 Lerner got his start as a poet; Heti is also a playwright. Both repeatedly advertise their own ambivalences and non-expertise. Lerner's published book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry, shapes his public persona as the successful poet who hates poetry.13 In it, he makes inclusive gestures to "those of us who don't read poetry" (30), and bases claims about "bad" poetry on evidence that, he insists, is apparent to even those "of us" who don't consider themselves "readers." Heti's public persona shares traits with Lerner's. She has founded "Trampoline Hall," a well-loved Toronto barroom lecture series defined by having lecturers who are forbidden to speak on any topic in which they are professionally an expert.14 And both writers have acknowledged a certain kind of comic social performance inherent in the nature of their literary work. In addition to linking his poetic practice with the amateur performances of high school speech and debate,15 Lerner has suggested that some of the earliest forms of poetry he himself participated in were childish joke cycles, functioning as a kind of collective poetry.16 Heti has similarly linked her work with public practices of humor, explicitly comparing her work to that of her brother David Heti, a professional stand-up comic.17 Lerner postures as a literary skeptic attempting literary belief, just as Heti postures as a playful dilettante performing seriousness. As such, both writers effectively position themselves publicly — and somewhat ironically and humorously — as non-novelist novelists.

Accordingly, their narrator-protagonists, who are fictionalized versions of themselves, pose as amateurs, dilletantes, and immature non-novelists. This is the case not only for their early novels — Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, and Heti's How Should a Person Be? (I'm excluding Heti's Ticknor for certain reasons18) — but even in their most recent novels their crafted alter-egos are still conspicuously beginners. Lerner's third novel, The Topeka School, reaches back chronologically to his high school immaturity for inspiration, displaying a younger Lerner, an aspiring poet and nationally-ranked high school debater skilled at lecturing about things he knows nothing about;19 in Heti's third novel Motherhood, her fictionalized proxy sees herself as only now apprehending her life purpose, reasoning to herself that "Literature, I knew, was the only thing that could be begun at forty."20 Throughout these five novels, the narrating beginner-writers use seemingly unartistic, inexperienced methods to deal with their struggle to be legitimate artists. Such shortcuts, as they are implicitly framed, include translating and modifying famous poetry (in Leaving the Atocha Station), recording and transcribing the dialogue of others (in How Should a Person Be?), splicing together excerpts from the narrator's other writing (10:04), flipping a coin to determine how to proceed with one's life and novel (Motherhood), and, of course, in all of these novels, using one's own life as too-convenient source material (like Heti and Lerner themselves might be accused of doing). These practices invite accusations of gimmickry, in Sianne Ngai's definition: "repulsive" and yet "maintaining a degree of charm," they appear as "bits of business for performing aesthetic operations that we somehow become distracted into regarding as aesthetic objects in their own right."21 And these practices invite readers to see the autofictive novel itself as potentially the biggest hack: a genre of the unsuccessful who fail to imagine other worlds, who fail to extend beyond their own artistic solipsism. Their narrators are often not even trying to write novels, but poetry and plays: it is implied that anautofictive künstlerroman, in most cases, is what they end up with instead. They frame what readers hold in their hands as the salvaged remains of a failed attempt to create beauty and art. In the words of one of Heti's narrators, this is the last-ditch effort to create a "castle" out of "shit."22

Heti's and Lerner's practices reframe the künstlerroman genre and deliberately challenge the assumptions that undergird it, both parodying and innovating on it — especially as it might be identified not only in a long European tradition, but also as it is employed by many other "autofiction" writers of the contemporary moment. Their work differs from the modes of seriousness in the work of the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard or the British Rachel Cusk, but also from the modes of seriousness employed by fellow North American writers Teju Cole and Tao Lin — whose fictionalized selves cannot avoid, and thus are tasked to deal more soberly with, being read as racialized "others." The künstlerroman, however, has never been the genre of the immature beginner, but the opposite: a genre of the successful, the established, the authoritative, the serious. Yet, Lerner writes what one critic calls "Lerner's Man-Child Trilogy,"23 and Heti's novels are similarly concerned with the child within her (in Motherhood), and the figure of the puer aeternus, the eternal child who does not grow up (in How Should a Person Be?). For both writers, such an engagement with immaturity is a way not only to ask questions about what art is supposed to be, but what art is supposed to do, and what undergirds artistic authority and legitimacy. Lerner in fact reads Knausgaard as exemplifying Baudelaire's definition of the man-child, of one possessing "the genius of childhood," "a genius for whom no edge of life is blunted."24 In contrast to Knausgaard, Heti's and Lerner's fiction troubles and prods this figure, asking whether this kind of genius should in fact be a source of shame and a certain sign of failure.25 And yet, even in challenging the authority and legitimacy of the man-child-genius that künstlerromane like Knausgaard's rely on, Heti's and Lerner's own purposefully sloppy, amateur anti-institutional protagonists who joke about their failure might still be seen, through Mark McGurl's observations, as a privileged product and direct reinforcement of the anti-institution institutional values of the North American writing industry.26 But what I will subsequently outline as punchline aesthetics is more than a product of creative writing culture; Heti's and Lerner's novels themselves offer many suggestions regarding why a humorous style resembling a comedian's routine might be effective for a white North American twenty-first century novelist concerned with the purpose of art.

2. Punchlines and Scripts

In the first paragraphs of Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the protagonist Adam describes his artistic "process" for his "project" (which includes "rolling a spliff," "shitting, taking a shower, my white pills [. . .] and leaving for the Prado."27 But one morning his project reaches "a turning point": during his routine daily visit to the Madrid museum, he witnesses a man having a "profound experience of art" (8). Standing in Adam's own customary spot before a Flemish painting, the man is convulsively crying. Observing him as though observing an alternate self, Adam worries that this man is having what he himself has never been able to have — but, implicitly, what all artists are supposed to have. Adam fixates on this specific personal failure throughout the rest of the novel. He emphasizes the expectation for a genuine aesthetic encounter in no other terms, often italicizing it — "a profound experience of art" — as though to underscore the specifications of this script, the inflexibly unattainable standards against which he measures his distance from being a real poet and assesses his failure. In confronting what this means for himself as an artist, he attests that "the closest I'd come to a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity" (9). This witty, concise reframing of his failure as an artist allows him to assert how he does indeed make good on the terms dictated by this artistic (and semantic) script, and in this to question what profundity and aesthetic experience each actually mean.

By using the word "scripts," I deliberately intend to engage the multiple meanings this word connotes: "scripts" can be considered literally, as written texts, rehearsed lines and semantic codes; they can also be considered more metaphorically, referring to performed social roles and the expectations attached to them.28In all five of Lerner and Heti's künstlerromane, the narrators are fixated — with a rigidity that Bergson would call comic — on such social, cultural and linguistic scripts, and particularly those scripts that deem artists mature or successful or important or politically engaged.29 In Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), as mentioned above, the narrator Adam fixates on the social scripts that signal poetic and linguistic authenticity and legitimacy; in Lerner's 10:04 (2014), the unnamed narrator anticipates the expectations people have for a well-paid artist and a mature, responsible-with-children adult. His third novel, The Topeka School (2019), investigates the social scripts that, among other things, surround masculinity and violence, including the "macho scripts" made conspicuous in the political climate of 2016 (270). The scripts addressed in Heti's How Should a Person Be? (2010) and Motherhood (2018) are signaled immediately by their titles: the former fixates on the social scripts of artistic "importance" and celebrity as the narrator, Sheila, struggles to write a play and discern how to "be" (and, namely, how to be an "Important Artist"); in the latter, the narrator (again, also named Sheila) repetitively parses the social scripts around motherhood, artistic vocation, and social success, weighing whether to become a mother herself. In each of these five novels, the narrators are as much trapped in the language of others' expectations (and, at times, the constraints of language itself), as they are trapped in others' expectations. Jokes, and punchlines, specifically, rely on an audience's knowledge of semantic and social scripts — and, often, an identification with those scripts — in order to play on, pun on, and twist readers' expectations. But for Lerner and Heti, they also become the means by which these narrators, on the one hand, pun on, parody, and challenge the scripts of those expectations and, on the other, still make good on them.

And we see this playing out in the above example from Leaving the Atocha Station: like a good punchline, Adam's self-narration moves from conflict to resolution, from serious failure (of having no profound experience) to playful failure (of profoundly experiencing profundity's absence), and in doing so he is able to comically manage his own fraudulence. He twists his experience into one that might still "count," one that will not as overtly conflict with the expectation to have a "profound" experience of some kind, as he is still desperate to measure himself according to the very scripts that suggest his failure. This comedy continues across the novel: when everyone else around him "seemed to be having a profound experience of art [. . .] displaying an absorption I refused to believe was felt," Adam struggles to externally display that archetypal interested disinterestedness too (27). But he begins "losing coordination in my face, my eyes still wide but now a little too wide, the hint of a smile lost and with it all suggestion of detachment." Bug-eyed and flailing, Adam reframes his failure through slapstick, suggesting himself a ridiculous man, an object of laughter, rather than an object of pity or scorn. By inviting readers to laugh at Adam's obvious fraudulence, the novel invites readers to see the absurdity of a man desperate to cling to the social scripts surrounding art — ready to contort his face as well as his self-narration into a frame that might guide others to see him as a genuine artist. At its best, Leaving the Atocha Station (and Lerner's and Heti's novels generally) challenges readers to question not just the clichéd scripts around aesthetic appreciation in general, but to question, in particular, the kind of art — and the kind of artists — that so desperately projects for others what is conventionally esteemed as true, authentic, and mature.

And yet, Adam's rebellion against "a profound experience of art" risks signaling to readers that the phrase "a profound experience of art" is more than it is — a hegemony to obsessively debunk (and yet, in so doing, implicitly genuflect before, as Adam does), rather than simply the language games of an insecure Fulbright grantee struggling to write poetry. The phrase "a profound experience of art" has elements of the cliché, but it isn't as thoroughly a stock phrase in culture as Adam makes it out to be; Adam's outsized rebellion against it threatens to obscure that Adam himself is also an object of critique in this novel. His rebellion against the scripts of aesthetic appreciation is presented as a trope, a cliché, a "script," in itself, and in turn cannot be taken too seriously. As John Baskin has suggested, readers of Leaving the Atocha Station have enthusiastically (and, perhaps, profoundly) identified with Adam's skepticism toward aesthetic experience, to the point of overlooking how Lerner's novel itself is an aesthetic project built through and dependent on this irreverent script-play.30 While Adam's punning self-deprecation allows this novel to challenge the norms and assumptions around aesthetic relation, it risks modeling a critique of the aesthetic as a function of the aesthetic as such.

Punchlines about personal failure have the capacity to challenge the social scripts dictating that failure — but they do not necessarily avoid reinforcing those scripts, nor do they in themselves provide a full escape from the strictures those scripts entail or the assumptions that undergird them. An extended example from a Heti short story metafictively reflects on the risks of Heti's and Lerner's punchline aesthetics and the limits of presenting one's life as a joke. Her story published in The New Yorker "My Life is a Joke" was originally delivered onstage at a stand-up comedy club before a live audience and has elements similar to a standup comedy routine.31 Heti'snarrator begins by explaining that she has died, that she died alone, and that in dying alone, she didn't have what her first boyfriend said was the goal of life and the point of marriage: to have a witness to your life. She did not marry her first boyfriend. He got the wife, kids, and the many witnesses that he wanted. She, on the other hand, died alone in the most literal sense: she died by suicide, with no one to see her die. In fact, she deliberately walked out in front of an oncoming truck after her last boyfriend told her that "[she] is a joke and [her] life is a joke." Describing her death, she reflects, "What a chicken I was. I couldn't bear any aspect of living. Especially that old custom: that you have to live a better life than everyone else." In fact, she says, she was a chicken who "crossed the road to get to the other side," with the other side being "death," a sui-side. Her life, she explains, is most certainly a joke, a joke in its most classic form: she was that chicken who crossed the road for the sake of that classic punchline.

She goes on to declare that she has come back from "the other side" to let everyone know that she in fact did have what her first boyfriend claimed was life's goal. She did have a witness. Her last boyfriend truly saw her, her true self, and the truth about her life and eventual death. "My life and death were witnessed, I tell you! Witnessed and foretold!" She concludes her monologue:

My first boyfriend found himself a witness, and I have come to declare that I found one too. I won, you see? I won! I won the best thing a person can win — to be seen! I declare it here today. It's the only reason I crawled into my flesh to stand before you — a joke on this stage. His words no longer hurt me. They make me feel so proud.

Why did the chicken cross the road? That's me. I am the chicken. And I got to the other side. He knew this would happen when he spoke those words. How beautiful to be seen.

Playing on the semantic scripts of an ur-joke, Heti's short story thus concludes on the doubleness classic to punchlines: expanding what it means to have one's life be a "joke," it moves the story from incongruity to resolution, bridging the serious failure (of being a joke, of having no witnesses) with the playful failure (of being a joke, of having unconventional witnesses). On one hand, this ending is celebratory and winning: throughout the short story, Heti's narrator excessively repeats the same phrases and formulas — that her "life is a joke," that she is the "chicken," who crossed the road to get "to the other side," and that she was "witnessed." Her linguistic range barely strays beyond this limited register as she strategically reinterprets these terms — ultimately "winning" to the greatest degree, perhaps, because she has the most witnesses in a laughing audience. On the other hand, the story still challenges the ideas of needing a witness, of needing to have a better life than everyone else, and it does so by making the protagonist a desperate, comic example of one still clinging to social scripts, to the opinions of old boyfriends, to that "old custom" that one needs to live a life better than everyone else. If Heti's narrator won because she could joke about her failure, gathering further witnesses in her laughing audience, this winning doesn't resolve the fact that she died, nor does it void her dependence on the act of performance itself.

In this, Heti's story metafictively reflects on the strategy that her novels (and Lerner's) employ: failure is resolved when one can frame that failure comically and publicly before others, but this "resolution," relying on comic relief, provides no real closure. The joke works at its most sophisticated level if readers understand the falsity in this resolution — that, in this case, the fun of "winning" is mitigated by being already dead, and still chained as ever to the opinions of an old boyfriend.

Punchline aesthetics operates by engaging the tension between "I am the chicken" with "how beautiful to be seen" — that is, by utilizing the deflating mechanics of a punchline within a project of aesthetics explicitly invested in beauty, wonder, and the "profound." But the "beauty" that readers "see" is necessarily more than what the narrator considers herself to present, more than the boasts of a reanimated-but-still-dead ex-girlfriend. The aesthetic value in comic framings of failure requires recognizing that the whole thing is a gag, and that the gag is in itself only a false resolution. To appreciate what Heti's short story "My Life is a Joke" provides is to appreciate the incongruous juxtaposition in punchline aesthetics, to appreciate the deliberately and necessarily ineffective answer that bathetic puns provide to more sophisticated questions regarding what it means to be "seen." This sideways inutility is itself the pointed payoff of Lerner's and Heti's aesthetic projects, the manner by which the art work has its total effect, by which it challenges the social scripts that would suggest one must "win," must "have a better life," must make better art "than everyone else," that one's art must "save the world."

The pointed juxtaposition of cheap tricks and aesthetic aspirations plays out across Heti and Lerner's novels. One final example will show the logic of punchline aesthetics. In Heti's How Should a Person Be?, the narrator Sheila worries about an event from her past: her college boyfriend, after a fight, stayed up all night and wrote a play in which a character named Sheila ends up giving a blowjob to a Nazi in a dumpster. The college boyfriend presented her life as a hideously ugly work of art, and Sheila worries across the novel that this reading of her might in some way be true — particularly as she herself struggles to write a play, that same genre her life was co-opted into. Near the end of the novel, she finally resigns herself to her ex-boyfriend's ridiculous, vindictive, and petty reading with a discordant gravitas: "Who am I to hold myself aloof from the terrible fates of the world? My life need be no less ugly than the rest." (274). She figures the beauty of her life in litotes's negative terms as "no less ugly," resigning herself to a life barely salvaged from total failure. But Sheila's intense solemnity about a life "no less ugly" is not the real resolution for the distress caused by her ex-boyfriend's frivolous, mean prediction: for reading audiences, the real denouement lies in recognizing what a false and ridiculous predicament Sheila has embraced, in recognizing the hilarious juxtaposition between a Nazi-blowjob-dumpster punchline (vulgar, cheap, and literally "trashy") and Sheila's grave concern with the profound beauty of her life. Other scholars have read this moment of Sheila's resignation as the stimulus for the novel's disregard of aesthetic convention, a grounding logic of artistic innovation that derives from the genre of "self-help."32 But such readings overlook how comically absurd this entire scene is, how incongruous Sheila's fantasies of an aestheticized life are with the cheap mechanics of punchlines. The whole thing is a joke: Sheila solemnly resigns herself to metaphorically salvage her life from a fictional dumpster dreamt up by a vindictive and immature college boyfriend. The novel's "beauty" and profundity lie in its ability to magnify the dilemma Sheila has created for herself in the first place, a dilemma deriving from her adherence to others' opinions in the aesthetic project of herself. She, not her college boyfriend, has added the final punchline, salvaging her life by making it hilarious and deliberately laughable.

Unlike other forms of literary humor that involve provocative undecidability, punchline aesthetics barely feigns to maintain any interpretive upper hand over its audience. In contrast to deadpan humor, it does not rely on emotional neutrality or the obscuring of an artist's intention from the audience; in contrast to humor of "kidding on the square," of making a joke but meaning it soberly, punchline aesthetics does not rely on a latent snide seriousness. Rather, punchline aesthetics invites readers to laugh at the outrageousness of artistic intention, no less sincere for its ridiculousness or its self-created ignominies. Heti's and Lerner's novels might be best appreciated insofar as their reframings of failure deliberately magnify the false predicaments the narrators confront in the first place — false dilemmas arising from the devoted adherence to those same scripts that measure their failure, that measure whether they are a genuine artist, a joke, or the possessor of a beautiful life.

3. Self-Help & Elite White Failure

I have repeatedly referred to the dilemmas that Heti's and Lerner's narrators attempt to resolve as "false predicaments," and in this I deliberately borrow language from Lerner's novel 10:04. Here, this practice of humorously reframing failure is a strategy taught by the narrator'stherapist.33 Both Heti and Lerner often risk modeling their practice of comic retelling as one of therapy or self-betterment ("Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head," Heti's Sheila tells herself (HSAPB 240). In this particular instance in 10:04, Lerner's unnamed narrator, here speaking in the third person, is meeting a librarian he hopes to impress at a café. He is concerned that, in not waving when she arrived and then over-compensating by not making eye contact, he has immediately made a "disastrous impression" (61).

But he remembered Dr. Roberts's idea. Roberts had said that when the author found himself in one of these "false predicaments," and he began to draw shorter and shorter breaths, he should just describe whatever little crisis he'd manufactured, what he was feeling, to whomever he was meeting in the same "winning and humorous way" he recounted it after the fact to Roberts. (61)

And he does:

"I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had this coffee in my hands and I was afraid I'd spill it and then I was afraid that by failing to wave I appeared unpleasant and then I felt myself scowling at appearing unpleasant and then realized I must really seem unpleasant and so had already made a disastrous impression."

She laughed as though this were indeed winning, and said, "You sound like your novel." The anxiety dissipated, but into flatness. He spilled some of the coffee lifting it to his lips. (61)

Here, describing himself in third person, Lerner's narrator situates what I have thus far called "punchline aesthetics" as a practice which is as bound up in contemporary life as it is a style of Lerner's novels — a practice of re-narration before an audience that ameliorates one's sense of failure before that audience, reinforcing a notion of selfhood that is bound up in aesthetic and narrative presentation. It is worth noting that even this passage ends with a deflating, self-deprecating (but nevertheless "humorous and winning") punchline — as though the narrator found himself caught in a "false predicament" in the very act of recounting this scene for the reader, and thus felt the need to recount this, too, with the comic relief of spilled coffee. The goal this passage describes — to transform a "false predicament" into something instead "winning and humorous" — whimsically threatens to obscure how, in this and other situations, the "crisis" was actually "manufactured." The narrator's obsessive attention to what others think of him, obsessive adherence to (imaginatively overdetermined) scripts of eye contact and etiquette, generates an outsized threat of social failure that could be solved by simply reducing his desperation to impress. But Adam remembers the therapeutic advice and recounts the predicament in a "winning and humorous" manner that echoes Heti's narrator in "My Life is a Joke," who declares she "won" by being a "joke on this stage." "Winning" holds the rich double entendre of both avoiding failure and being endearing, attractive, charming, likable by others in failure. Winning here means still meeting social and aesthetic expectations in and through failing to meet them. Through the librarian's response — "You sound like your novel" — 10:04 metafictively recognizes how this therapeutic practice is also explicitly a style of Lerner's autofictive künstlerroman. While this scene acknowledges that the "predicaments" that fill Lerner's novels are "false," the humorous, winning punchlines threaten to do for readers precisely what they are meant to do in therapy — to obscure this recognition of falsity and the shame it produces, artificially resolving and thus implicitly authorizing the dilemmas at hand.

Criticism surrounding Heti's and Lerner's novels follows suit and authorizes these dilemmas — and takes them as universal problems detached from the particularity of socially-coded scripts. An especially telling example is a book published by Fiction Advocate titled New Uses for Failure: Lerner's 10:04. The book describes itself as part-literary criticism, part "how-to,"34 taking Lerner's novels — and Heti's too — as self-help instructions for dealing with failure. It begins with an imperative address, full of solemnity: "You are going to fail, repeatedly, for the rest of your life. You know this. You're going to burn food or undercook it, you're going to get a speeding ticket or arrive too late for things, you're going to assume a less than worthy political perspective on at least some topic."35 Speaking in an autobiographical first person, the author Adam Coleman enumerates these "failures" — which are conspicuously deemed as such against external social codes and others' expectations. Arriving "too late" or assuming a "less than worthy political perspective" are the kinds of "failures" that are usually assigned by others according to the norms of a particular social group, not measured as failures by the standard of any impersonal and universal moral or ethical law. He conceives of failure as "imprecise representation, whether that representation exists in your mind or is transferred from your mind into the world" — which is effectively to say that his notion of failure rests on being misunderstood by others, on not being completely able to make one's self and intentions fully known. And though he doesn't locate the resolution to such failure as always rooted in humor, Coleman embraces Lerner's "mood of comic hopefulness,"36 his "comic attitude toward fumbling,"37 and his "stumbling, slapstick approach"38 as ways to deal with "materially-actual misfortune,"39 ways, that is, to maintain a "continual consideration of the possible."40 Coleman likens Heti's method to Lerner's, one that "amplifies the embarrassing recognitions" of an individual striving to respond to failure.41

Coleman's approach to what he calls "failure" might not be exemplary of criticism, but it certainly exemplifies a kind of readership that Lerner's and Heti's novels can attract and cultivate. If one conceives of failure as externally assigned, as deriving from being misunderstood by others, one expects to be understood, and welcomes instructions to ensure it. This notion of failure suggests itself as native to certain social and cultural milieu: experiencing "imprecise representation" as a personal failure to be resolved through a "mood of comic hopefulness" is a concern for persons who do not encounter "imprecise representation" as a pervasive, structural lived reality; to fret about the personal "failure" of "imprecise representation" is likely to not have experienced, among other things, continual objectification as racially or socially other. Moreover, one must have a particular expectation for misfortune to see "stumbling, slapstick" as an "approach" to dealing with it.

Yet, to point out how Heti's and Lerner's narrators' ideas of "failure" (seized on by critics like Coleman) are coded as white and elite is not to say any more than what Heti and Lerner already emphasize in their novels. Their narrators struggle with the "false predicaments" created by an adherence to social and cultural expectations that are distinctly racialized and classed; they hold themselves to the scripts, behaviors, and presentation of values that white, progressive educated elites are expected to demonstrate. When Heti's Sheila describes her fellow playwrights, she describes how "all the white men I know are going to Africa. They want to tell the stories of African women. They are so serious" (HSAPB 168). She underscores her racial awareness, pointing out that they are all acting from a place of whiteness by repeatedly emphasizing them as "white men" with the desire to "wear on the outside one's curiosity, one's pity, one's guilt . . . " She judges them — but only feigns to contrast their desire with hers:

All I want is to look back with no regrets. And perhaps to go to Africa and return with the story of an impoverished black woman whose boyfriend has AIDS and drinks, and whose four babies have AIDS and drink — to communicate something of greater importance to North Americans than the poverty of my soul. (169)

Concluding her description of "the white men" with this, Sheila delivers the punchline that she wants precisely what she judges. Layering this comedy, she adds another invitation for laughter: her absurd romanticization of a "black" tragedy involving (archetypal stand-up fodder of) "four babies [who] drink." By referring to these women not as inhabitants of a diverse range of African nations and ethnic groups but as black, she codes the kind of failure she wants to represent in distinctly racialized terms (and not politico-economic ones like "first" and "developing" worlds), terms that reciprocally code her position as white, as implicitly not "impoverished," as experiencing "poverty" only in her "soul." She codes her whiteness as always already an aesthetic failure — demonstrating an idea of whiteness that, in the words of Toni Morrison, sees whiteness as possessing a "lack," a "deficiency," as requiring the "acquisition" of "blackness" in order to be aesthetically successful.42 And in all of this, she foregrounds herself and her outrageous self-concern that she may have "regrets," that she may fail to be in that culturally-elite category of "Important Artists" (which Heti's Sheila capitalizes in the similar manner that Lerner's Adam italicizes "a profound experience of art"). She has failed to "save the world," as she desperately aims to do in this essay's epigraph, inviting readers to mourn with her that all she has instead is "the poverty of my soul." Of course, readers aren't really invited to mourn with her as much as laugh at her self-absorption and her feigned humility: like Adam's profound experience of the absence of profundity, she mourns that she doesn't possess the story of the impoverished, just possesses the "poverty" of her "soul." Readers are invited to laugh at the punchline of this entire "false predicament" she has created, holding herself to a racialized and racializing script of how white artists are supposed to become "Important"; to put it pointedly, the joke is that the poverty of the white soul can only be recuperated by somehow aestheticizing the material poverty of hypothetical African people. But by making this joke, mocking herself and implicitly challenging these racializing artistic scripts, she in a certain light manages to live up to them: she uses "an impoverished black woman" to indeed communicate, at the very least, the inane vapidity of her interior life. Once again, punchline aesthetics operates by humorously dredging up the very failure it attempts to deal with: in order to aestheticize a perceived failure of whiteness, she racializes, romanticizes, and instrumentalizes an abstract non-white failure, and thereby perversely compounds (toward a comic end) precisely that which she attempts to ameliorate.

Punchline aesthetics, demonstrated in Heti's and Lerner's novels as a self-help or therapeutic practice for dealing with certain relative "failure," presents itself as a cultural phenomenon of the contemporary moment. If one has the possibility of performing one's failures for an audience, one has the opportunity to recuperate those failures — and the variety of art forms, both high and low, enabled by the internet have certainly increased those opportunities. The past decade has seen a surfeit of television shows featuring stand-up comedians performing off-kilter versions of themselves; punchline aesthetics particularly mark the comedy routines of straight white comedians, like Louis CK or Amy Schumer, whose comic personas focus on their ostensible personal failures to live up to both the physical ideals, as well as the projected political and moral values, of white heterosexual masculinity or femininity. Punchline aesthetics is similarly embodied by the now-dated internet abbreviation "FML," or "Fuck My Life," defined by Merriam-Webster as "an expression of rueful chagrin."43 Used to emphasize despair, regret or irritation toward what Lexico specifies as a distinctly "personal situation,"44 "FML" is always a mechanism of comic relief; as standardized by the popular late-aughts internet blog "Fmylife.com,"^⁠3 the acronym "FML" is only employed at the end of a personal anecdote, pointedly used as the instruction to laugh, shifting the embarrassingly serious into mocking play. And such self-deprecating self-narration is usually read as humorous when one's life is marked by relative privilege: the comedy of "FML" works because the internet anecdotes shared are not true tragedies, just as Amy Schumer's self-deprecating humor works because she is not really "fat" and thus still assimilable to normative standards of white, blond femininity, or just as Louis CK's humor worked (previously) because he is middle-aged, dumpy, balding, and thus a relatively normal white man. "FML" works because the life being "f***ed" is still relatively privileged, relatable to its laughing audiences, and never in a situation of genuine precarity. Punchlines are used to aestheticize personal failure when that failure cannot be sentimentalized, romanticized, or otherwise "resolved" because of its privileged context (however ethically corrupt those resolutions themselves are — like Sheila's romanticization of the "greater importance" of "an impoverished Black woman").

While tracing all the historical conditions for this contemporary style is beyond the scope of this essay, punchline aesthetics likely appears as a strategy in a contemporary moment because contemporary politics require artists (not to mention internet users) to more overtly reckon with the privilege of their positions — and to recognize the ridiculousness implicit in the act of grieving their own artistic failure.In the context of the work of Heti and Lerner, punchline aesthetics invites readers to mock the personas of liberal-arts-educated narrators who are getting paid to make art, narrators whose failure certainly can't be recuperated through self-pity. The epigraphs at the beginning of this essay are funny because their narrators' outrageous fantasies of artistic success are patently a product of their privileged positions, hilariously unable to be taken seriously because their delusional personal aspirations have been encouraged by those same scripts that judge their failure.

Other critics recognize that Lerner's and Heti's projects are magnifying forms of a certain elite white failure — not whiteness conceiving itself as inherently aesthetically impoverished and artistically "failed," but more literally understood as the very inability of whiteness to confront this construction. These novels magnify, as the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong puts it, "the failure within whiteness to see itself, name itself, and, ultimately, confront itself."45 In an interview with Lerner (who was also once Vuong's professor), Vuong praises Lerner for how, in his novels and especially in 10:04, he "refused [the narrator] the mantel of a savior, insisting instead on the reckoning a white character undergoes when confronting the white supremacist system he lives in and benefits from." Vuong suggests that this is a presentation of whiteness that has "become so intimately powerless with itself," and seizes on a particular example from 10:04 to demonstrate this. The narrator has just listened to the story of a woman named Noor while they bagged dried mangoes at a Brooklyn co-op; Noor tells the narrator how she discovered, as an adult, that she was adopted by her father and is thus not of Lebanese ancestry as she always believed. Vuong describes his reading of this scene:

Adam feels both arrested and saddened by this deep history coming from a stranger — but perhaps also helplessness, guilty? He then walks to a park wishing he could have comforted her without it sounding like "presumptuous co-op nonsense," but instead sits on a bench eating an "irresponsible" amount of dried mangoes. What struck me about this passage is its depiction of white frustration while refusing formal or moral closure. It doesn't force, within the tantalizingly infinite possibilities of a novel, an answer that resolves the protagonist's discomfort, and by extension, that of white privilege.

Vuong is correct that the novel ultimately doesn't provide any kind of real closure to Noor's story or this section's pathos. However, it does provide a kind of simulated closure, one that Vuong incidentally draws attention to: the final image of the narrator sitting on a bench eating an "irresponsible" amount of dried mangoes. This pseudo-closure poses an interpretive problem for readers, and Vuong's silence about it is suggestive; either readers must consciously refuse or passively accept this comic, deflating punchline of the narrator eating an "irresponsible" amount of dried fruit. His feelings, perhaps of "sadness," "helplessness," and "guilt," are concentrated into a humorous behavior that readers are invited to judge: gorging on a food evocative of all the kinds of privilege he enjoys (a bulk quantity of a dried tropical fruit bagged in a Brooklyn co-op). The anecdote wouldn't function in the same way if Lerner's narrator simply went and sat on a bench and stared off into space, or wept, or anxiously fiddled with his shoelace — such details would evoke "helplessness," "guilt" or "frustration," but would not provide the same closure for the scene. Nor would the scene provide the same simulated closure if it was missing the humorous litotic emphasis on being "not responsible," showcasing the narrator's implicit, continued concern with how responsible, mature, and secure he might appear to others. This mango-eating detail echoes what Coleman describes as Lerner's resolution-yielding, self-help, "comic attitude toward fumbling" and "stumbling, slapstick approach." It offers a relief-valve, a Freudian release of tension through laughter. It allows readers to laugh at the narrator — but laugh with Ben Lerner — at this white man comically beside himself. It allows anyone who feels themselves personally confronted with "the failure within whiteness to see itself" to laugh off that confrontation, to focus on this "irresponsible," mango-binging white male who is condensing the tension of the moment.

And perhaps this is why Vuong reads this scene the way he does — as though there is no humor, as though any attempt at a punchline here has already fallen flat and is thus not worth mentioning. As previously discussed, jokes and punchlines operate through an audience's recognition of and, to a certain degree, identification with the social scripts and social relationships that are being played on. Vuong's identification here, particularly as a Vietnamese American, may not be with the subject whose ridiculousness conducts comic relief, who is beside himself over the scripts that suggest what a "responsible," racially-aware response might be, and what constitutes a "responsible" amount of dried mangoes to consume. For Vuong, perhaps the failure of the joke — that binge-eating mangoes and what it figures isn't funny — is the point. From Vuong's reading, we might understand a second degree of white failure that poignantly compounds (rather than resolves) itself: the failure of the punchline to ameliorate the anticipated sense of failure, powerlessness and helplessness.

Of course, the failure that Lerner's narrator recounts — the failure of not knowing what to do, of eating his feelings, of being endearingly "irresponsible" — is not a true failure, only a "false predicament" that can be resolved through humor. A deeper, unhumorous failure would be much more challenging for any reader to identify with; a troubling and weighty failure might involve a reaction from Lerner's narrator that is brash, egotistical, offensive, one that makes the reader yet more uncomfortable — one that doesn't allow Lerner's narrator to provide any "winning and humorous" comic relief. Though Vuong praises Lerner for not writing a white savior, Lerner writes an alternate type, one that readers like Coleman are tempted to take as a model and solution, one that, through humor, can still make good on the scripts of ethical and social success that are expected for a successful white artist. And yet, Vuong's silence on the humor of this scene — besides underscoring how punchlines rely on particular kinds of identification — might also suggest a lingering critical possibility. When Heti and Lerner present something that is pointedly comic but deliberately falls flat as a punchline, they are able to magnify the way humor illuminates, generates, or elides certain social relationships.

4. Saving the World

Lerner and Heti recognize that their protagonists, especially in their earlier novels, are taken as teachers, as models of dealing with socially-coded failure, as self-help avatars, as the heirs to a possibly overdetermined call for sincerity. Their recent novels provide evidence of an increased awareness of the risks their styles run, for Heti and Lerner amend their styles in Motherhood and The Topeka School in similar ways. Both novels still begin with comic punchlines, but soon become much more somber than either author's previous fiction; likewise, both novels end on punchlines of sorts, but these final punchlines are conspicuously unfunny, and therefore bring into relief the significance of the self-deprecating, joking, and "winning" resolutions in their previous work. This parallel shift suggests both writers' recognition of the limits of punchline aesthetics. And, strangely, it suggests an affinity for what punchline aesthetics had been deployed to challenge — namely, the expectation for an artist's work to "do" something. As both writers demonstrate an awareness of the limits of punchline aesthetics, their most recent novels seem to take on the aims that the parodic epigraphs at the beginning of this essay mocked.

The first chapter of Ben Lerner's The Topeka School ends with a punchline — a funny one — that demonstrates a pointed awareness of how his previous novels have been read. Adam, Ben Lerner's recurrent avatar, is a senior in high school, monologuing to his girlfriend Amber on a boat adrift in a lake surrounded by suburban homes. After rambling to her about his personal hopes for the future, he discovers that she is no longer on the boat. This first chapter sets up the joke, chronicling his frantic attempts to find her, including accidentally breaking into the wrong house, fearing that she has drowned, and worrying that he'll be framed for her murder. The "punchline," at least the first layer of it, is Adam's discovery that Amber is waiting at his car — that she had been there all along after she slipped off the boat into the water, bored by his monologue. This punchline, though, actually belongs to Amber, and it's a joke she's staged before; she tells Adam about how she once slipped from her chair at the dinner table while her stepfather, unaware, monologued about Ross Perot. Once her stepfather realized she and her mother had let him embarrass himself, he gave her a stare conveying "how dare you cunts laugh at me," but eventually he played along like it was "all a big joke" that he was also in on (15). Amber's message to Adam about his masculinist, didactic monologuing (what is now colloquially called "mansplaining") is lost on Adam, and "it would take Adam twenty years to grasp the analogy between her slipping from the chair and from the boat" (15). In the moment, he feels uneasily embarrassed; he considers recounting his failures of the past hour in an aestheticized way ("maybe he could bring out the poetry of it"), but he decides he doesn't "want to risk it. To protect himself (from what, he wasn't sure), he vaguely imagined an East Coast city where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony." When the joke's on him, he imagines the possibilities of humorous, therapeutic self-narration where he could joke about his past failures — as the author Lerner himself has already conspicuously done in his novels, and continues to do in this scene.

The metaphorical message of Amber's boat- (or chair-) slipping is meant to extend conspicuously to Lerner's writing: in the opening pages of this third novel, the female audience jumps off the metaphorical boat after Lerner's fictional surrogate monologues about himself and his desires. The Topeka School, from the beginning, signals that it is aware of the risks and failures of Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, insofar as the narratives were dominated by a mansplaining male narrator who — though conspicuously flawed and continuously parodied — was nevertheless assuming a speaking authority and allowing readers to take as therapeutic models his punchlines about white male failure. In this novel, instead, Lerner largely alternates between sections written in the third person about Adam and his peers and sections narrated in the first person by fictionalized avatars of his mother and father. Still interested in scripts, The Topeka School gives attention to, among other things, the violence of "toxically" masculine discourses, postures, and social norms. The novel ends with a series of narrative denouements, but here they are not supposed to be humorous: quoted speech from President Donald Trump, a MAGA hat, an ICE protest, a confrontation with a "toxically" masculine father on a playground — the novel reveals a hyper-contextualized and politicized 2016 as the unfunny punchline that the narrative of 1990s Topeka, beginning with Amber's boat jump, was setting up. "2016" is meant to resolve the tense question of where the preceding narrative would lead. Lerner's method has changed conspicuously: his ending does not try to be wry or self-deprecating, and instead focuses on being "winning" only in its somber political didacticism. It finally ends with an example of a grown Lerner (the punchline to Adam) attempting to overcome his solipsistic self-narration and lose himself in a collective public, literally chanting with a crowd on the steps of a Federal building at the end of the novel. This ending directly recalls the epigraph I quoted from Leaving the Atocha Station, but in a manner that sheds its humorous, "winning" punchline qualities: the novel rather seriously attempts "to take on the United States of [Trump], to shed its scare quotes [ . . . ] on the Capitol steps or whatever" with "everybody everywhere" reading Lerner's novels.

Like Lerner's The Topeka School, Heti's later book Motherhood also starts off comically, with a protagonist that is immature in familiar ways: the narrator (again named Sheila), is indecisive about a range of things in her life, including how to write this novel, but chiefly about whether she should have children. She consults a fortune teller and her own mock version of I Ching (i.e., flipping a coin) about a range of decisions, including where she should place a knife in her bedroom (and the novel includes pictures of the knife placed accordingly); there are plenty of moments to laugh at Sheila's failure to make decisions or her naive approach to weighty questions. But the novel grows more somber as Sheila reflects on what motherhood and female vocation has meant in culture. She considers what the experiences of both have meant for her mother and her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Like Lerner's novel, Motherhood involves a series of endings with a series of unfunny punchlines. One involves Sheila's realization that the fortune teller's prophecy about her future children was in fact an anachronistic prophecy about her grandmother — a realization that she carries her grandmother's experience within herself, giving her access to an experience of motherhood by proxy (275). In another unfunny punchline, Sheila identifies a knife — like the knife she had placed according to the I Ching's direction — in a photo in her mother's hand, when her mother was a young medical student (274). While these kinds of endings don't immediately register as punchlines because they are in no way humorous, they echo the narrative logic of a punchline insofar as they land on a crucial, reframing detail that resolves the tension of the preceding narrative. Heti's novel ultimately does not try to abstractly solve the question of whether a woman should become a mother, but instead tries to recuperate her mother's and grandmother's unhappy experiences of motherhood as a valuable foundation for her own decision to ultimately favor her writerly vocation. Her novel suggests itself as something ultimately meant to be only clever, charming, and "winning" in the most private context, to her own mothers — and her mother affirms this, somewhat cryptically calling the novel "magical" at the end. While Lerner attempts to shed his solipsistic, "winning" narration in the collective voice of a crowd, Heti chooses to shake off her self-engrossed narrative persona in the distinctly private sphere. In this, Heti, like Lerner, also does a version of that thing which her earlier novels mock, echoing the quotation from How Should a Person Be? included as an epigraph at beginning of this essay: Heti writes a novel that, though it doesn't "save the world," "saves three people" — herself, her mother, and her grandmother. The joke is mediated: she does not strive as aggressively as Lerner to be politically salient, but she does make a point to do something socially-legible with this novel — and, perhaps, in it, to save other para-mothers as well.

Heti's and Lerner's most recent novels — and these novels' endings in particular — suggest three things about punchline aesthetics. First, one can see this style more conspicuously when it is gone — and not only when the ending is conspicuously not funny, but when it gives up the dialectical circularity between pathos and punchlines, between art and gimmicks. These final novels signal themselves as art that is overtly trying to make something happen, overtly attempting politically and socially-charged messages. Consequently, they conspicuously contrast with what I have earlier called the "sideways inutility" of punchline aesthetics — the total effect and critical possibility of which relies on failing to make something happen. In this way, Heti and Lerner's later novels perhaps come to resemble further the various subgenre they have been associated with — bearing the stark relevancy of contemporary historical fiction, the practicality of self-help, the somber authority of the künstlerroman. Or, by abandoning punchline aesthetics, these later novels might be seen as simply catching up with efficacy of social realism; both novels protest, among other things, patriarchy in its abstract and particular forms.

Second, these final novels suggest that while there might be something gained in turning away from punchline aesthetics (e.g., certain risks averted, no accidental promises of therapy), there might also be something lost. When these novels turn away from the dialectical circularity, the ambiguity, and the sense of purposeless associated with classical ideas of the aesthetic, they give up asking the questions that their previous novels were, in the end, skilled at asking: At what point does the attempt to make "profound" and "Important" art sabotage its own efforts? And how might these efforts themselves be conditioned by class and racially coded expectations about who and how and by what measures "profound" and "Important" art is made? Granted, it is difficult to ask these questions when one is an established, noteworthy artist — as both Heti and Lerner arguably have become. These final novels bear an increased resemblance with memoirs, as their narrators' real-world referents are known to readers.

It is interesting, then, to consider these most recent novels against the increasingly popular genre of memoirs by comedians (from Trevor Noah to Mindy Kaling): unpacking the pathos behind the familiar joking, these books examine the identity positions that give shape to the artist's humor. For Heti and Lerner, this pathos is a grandmother's and mother's unhappy memories of post-holocaust survival and 1990s toxic masculinity in Topeka, respectively. Giving up the task of challenging what an "Important" artist is, they instead probe the social origins, and the gendered conditioning in particular, of their now arguably important work.

Finally, these latest novels, when held against the punchline aesthetics of the earlier ones, suggest an important point about the kind of self-conceived failure attendant to white-coded and elite social scripts. Though punchline aesthetics runs risks, at its best it is able to make conspicuous the self-consoling practices used to mitigate such "failure," as well as the idea of and uses for art that are attached to those practices. But, in turning from punchline aesthetics, Heti's and Lerner's later novels risk ceasing to interrogate what their earlier novels were skilled at questioning: art that can be confidently appraised by elite institutions, art that can justify the humanities and gain sponsorship from donors, art that has the kind of "purpose" warranted by elite social scripts — art that reads as "white success." Taking Heti's and Lerner's five künstlerromane together and reading them for their punchline aesthetics (or lack thereof) reveals a perhaps contentious and counterintuitive point: the dialectical purposelessness of punchline aesthetics is better at making conspicuous the self-consoling practices, the implicit racial bias and the strangled notions of artistic success held by white artistic elites than the art that overtly aims to do something "Important," that attempts to "take on the United States of Bush," that tries to self-consciously "save the world."

---

Dena Fehrenbacher is a John and Daria Barry Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in English at UC Berkeley. She received her PhD in English from Harvard University in 2019. Her scholarship has appeared in ASAP/Journal. Her current book project provides a theory of tone of voice in fiction, specifically focusing on tone's use in contemporary African Diasporic literature.

---

Banner Image: Dried Mangoes by Parpan05 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

References