BEN LERNER MIGHT BE the youngest writer in America who is permitted to write with luminous intelligence about erudite, urbane intellectuals without being accused of insularity. The American scribblers younger than Lerner are consigned to a fate of feigned populism or critical sniffing at anything that might pass for a sign of intelligence. He is that strange thing, the youngest major American writer, and perhaps also the last writer that our critical and cultural firmament has allowed to be unabashedly serious. The rest of us jesters have to shuck and jive and tell jokes to make our merry penny. This is not a criticism of Lerner, whose three previous novels constitute an integral contribution to that contested and much-maligned genre (or critical fabulation) of autofiction, but it does strike me that this artificial hothousing of Lerner is a bit unfair to him and more than a bit deadening to American literature in general.
Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, is a slim rumination on his core themes of reality and mediation. The novel has three parts—named “Hotel Providence,” “[Hotel Villa Real],” and “Hotel Arbez”—and chiefly concerns a middle-aged, unnamed narrator. In “Hotel Providence,” the narrator goes to interview his mentor, Thomas, for the last time. In a classic Lernerian comedy-of-technological-errors, he bricks his phone and cannot record the interview, but he does not disclose this to Thomas, whom he interviews anyway. “[Hotel Villa Real]” finds the narrator at a symposium in Madrid after Thomas has died. He delivers a set of remarks and discloses his earlier deception (this also raises the possibility that “Hotel Providence” might have been a set of prepared remarks given during this talk) and gets confronted by Rosa, a colleague and friend, who raises ethical questions about the interview and the narrator’s fraud. The final section, “Hotel Arbez,” features a conversation (though it is mostly a monologue) with Max, the narrator’s college friend and Thomas’s son, who details his own issues with his father and also the difficulties posed by his daughter’s eating disorder.
Transcription is stippled with dreams, anecdotes, recollections, and memories, such that the text itself becomes unstable and changeful in its relationship to any kind of fact-based order. Like most of Lerner’s work, Transcription is deeply invested in questions of reality and reality-testing, the process by which a person distinguishes (or fails to distinguish) between internal thoughts and the external world. As ever in Lerner’s fiction, the narrator is someone for whom this process glitches and scintillates as in a mosaic. Perhaps mosaic is the wrong word. Lerner’s narrators and speakers layer. For them, reality is a set of overlaid and interpolated sequences of events that, as in destructive interference, threaten to collapse into incoherence.
This instability is a unifying trait of Lerner’s novels, whose narrators and characters often find themselves adrift on waves of memory and recollection, slipping from this moment into some resonant moment in the past, as though the only way of living were to go about by trying to look forward and backward at the same time while they jangle their pockets for anecdotes and bits of learning. Time is unstable under their feet. In novels like 10:04 or Leaving the Atocha Station, this instability is a great strength, allowing flexibility and playfulness to turn otherwise dire or bleak subject matter into something surprising. Though Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 were, like Transcription, similarly slim volumes, they felt capacious and open. The Topeka School achieved a different kind of scale, covering a much larger social surface and venturing even deeper into the emotional firmament of its main character, Adam Gordon.
Across these three autofictional novels—which might be considered a series—Lerner riffed and referenced through disparate fields of art, music, psychology, medicine, science, philosophy, politics, history, literature, debate clubs, and the sexual mores of Midwestern teenagers. Still more impressive, he was able to achieve this breadth of reference without losing a sense of cool because he made it look so fucking effortless. In Lerner’s work, you could zing from a dinner with a literary agent (an eye-rolling prospect in the hands of any writer apart from Lerner) to the science of cephalopods to sitting in a small chair in a doctor’s office (again, not the sort of thing critics and readers are eager to receive from anyone apart from Lerner except perhaps Sheila Heti), awaiting news about a dire medical test, and feel, yes, a kind of pretentiousness, but also an intense desire to know where the book would leap to next. He made the Sebaldian look easy and spawned a generation of pale imitators who simply do not have the juice, as it were, or so we are told.
By contrast, Transcription feels like a retreat into a diminished scale—Lerner downsized for the streaming age. The themes are there. The usual moves are there: an unnamed narrator bumbling about in such a way as to allow Lerner to riff and reference his way into resonant images that open onto new insights about how we live; the long soliloquies in which people talk in past tense and memories about things they learned or saw, using the anecdote as a form; the digressions and the misdirections; the meditations on performance and art; the dry, essayistic bleeding into the lyric; the deadpan humor and witty observations about technology and its effects on our perception. All of it is there. This is a Ben Lerner novel, no doubt about it. Yet. None of it hits the same. In part because everything here is quieter, smaller. The digressions lead nowhere interesting. The lessons about mediation and technology we have heard before, chiefly in the work of Ben Lerner. The depth of field is much shallower here, rendering all of the details fuzzy and warped.
There are no bad sentences in this novel. I want to be clear about that. The form is very good. Three parts, each one subtly recontextualizing the others, introducing doubt about the metafictional status of the story being told. The ending section is brilliant, a moving and wonderful soliloquy about trying to contend with the wreckage of one’s own childhood while also trying to keep one’s own child alive. Yet, while reading Transcription, I had this eerie feeling of having heard this song before at greater volume. It seems unfair to rag on a book filled with beautiful sentences and true observations about how we live now, I know. But the cold fact is that many of the true observations about recording technology and the slipperiness of memory and the past in the first two parts of Transcription feel trite at this late date, as if Lerner had found the palest, most banal corner of contemporary life to offer commentary on. Perhaps I am jaded. Spoiled, even, by Lerner’s more interesting and energetic probing along these lines in other novels, but honestly, I found the first two sections of the novel really dull. Is it real? Can my memory be trusted? What is the line between fiction and life? Frankly, who cares? These are no longer live questions in Lerner’s hands. Not even he can make me care about autofiction and fixity, not when he’s asked those questions with more liveliness, depth, and humor in 10:04 and The Topeka School, and even in his poems.
The exception comes when Max, Thomas’s son, gives an extended Sebaldian soliloquy about his daughter’s eating disorder. It makes for urgent, harrowing reading, and for that brilliant stretch, Lerner is his unrivaled self, describing in literature an experience that has been, until this moment, unexpressed in literature. He finds a way to synthesize into drama an entire generational cohort’s anxieties about screens, about our bodies, about technology, about our relationships, about our presence in history. In Emmie (the daughter), Lerner finds an elegant and (more importantly) truthful expression of our contemporary spiritual condition of malaise and infirmity. In Max, he locates the neurotic, fretful, hyper-educated elite who are powerless, despite their material abundance, to do anything to rectify a spiritual sickness whose origins defy material or organic understanding. Max and his partner work with doctors, specialists, and therapists, and they try all sorts of things that are ineffective against their daughter’s simple, unexplained refusal to eat.
When she finally does begin to eat again, it is only with the aid of screens, and it is here that Max, the child of intellectuals and an educated elite in his own right, expresses some discomfort. He senses that there is some connection, and he isn’t wrong. After all, we consume content. We binge videos. We doomscroll. Here, Lerner’s own attitude toward the infinite glut of the internet peeks through just a little bit. One can sense an anxiety about the overflow, the excess, the unstaunched, which is itself an anxiety about, I think, pleasure or a loss of control.
This third section offers such an interesting exploration of contemporary consumption that I wish it had constituted a far greater proportion of the novel. At one point, he offers a description of device-usage that felt, to me, like a useful description of reading:
It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear. Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?
I wondered why this made me think about reading, but then I realized that it is because for me, reading is fundamentally an experience of immersion. I don’t think as I read. While I’m actually reading (or writing for that matter), I enter so fully into the text that a bomb could explode outside, and I wouldn’t know. I am so fully transported into what I am reading that I don’t really experience having a body at all. It is not, for me, a reduction of complexity or a loss of messiness. I don’t feel this way with movies or with music or with porn. In fact, reading (and, honestly, writing, too) is the only time when I am pure essence. Then I realized that what Max is really describing here is immersion, and that immersion is, perhaps, the organizing principle of contemporary life.
In Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, she discusses immersion and immediacy as being a loss of mediation, the dissolve of the middle. She links this to late capitalism and describes immediacy as the aesthetic of our time. Max’s daughter has been carried into the device. The boundary between her and the objects on the other side of the screen has been dissolved by way of ASMR, which provides somatic feedback at certain audio cues. In fact, the popularity and the predominance of ASMR in online content speaks, I think, to a desire for immediacy and immersion. ASMR works like magic because it links the thing you see on your phone to your precise temporal and spatial context. Think about your favorite moment in your favorite song. Then listen to that song. The odds are that when the moment approaches, you’ll feel a full-body tingle or feel the hairs on your arms stand up. Sometimes, we experience this as a coincidence. But in fact, I think it’s of a kind with the “satisfaction” Max’s daughter describes in the third section of the novel. Consider the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube accounts that specialize in short-form content or compilations of “oddly satisfying” videos. These videos often display eerily perfect alignments of brightly colored objects or something slotting just into place, which creates a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in viewers.
I think that the overwhelming appeal of this content has something to do with that little pop of euphoria, yes, but I think it has more to do with the fact that for the duration of that little pop of euphoria, the boundary between us and the digital Eden on the other side of the phone is eradicated. We become momentarily coupled to the thing we are witnessing on the other side of the screen.
This coupling—this dissolution of boundaries—is present right from the very beginning of Transcription. In “Hotel Providence,” as the narrator takes the train to Providence, Rhode Island, for the interview (this is to be the final interview because Thomas has plans to visit Dignitas, the Switzerland-based nonprofit specializing in physician-assisted suicide, though we come to learn this later), we find out that the narrator is anxious about losing the interview either due to failure to record or accidental deletion of the recordings. These are technological anxieties, but it might be said that they are really displaced fears about loss of memory, which themselves are displaced fears about eradication, which is further still a displaced fear over the status of one’s reality. That is: Am I real? Was I ever real? How do I know I am real? The narrator listens to a recording of a talk Thomas gave some decades ago in Paris, and Lerner performs a magic trick by overlaying these concerns:
Then I put my earbuds in and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973, that Thomas gave about translation. I took a photo of the wintry, post-industrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past. My mentor paused, fifty-one years ago, and poured water into a glass. Someone in the audience coughed twice.
Lerner captures varying levels of mediation all at once. There is the fact that the landscape passes on the other side of the window. There is the narrator’s reflection on the window. There is the phone’s viewfinder capturing both of those images together. Then there is the memory of the photo after the narrator deletes it. Inscribed in this is the audio of Thomas’s talk. Thomas pours water and the audience member coughs not in “parallel” to the present moment but in the present. What I mean is that the narrator is both sitting in the audience in Paris in 1973 and sitting on the train, just as he is sitting on the train and also appearing ghostly over the landscape passing outside. It’s a wonderful, subtle yet bravura piece of writing. It’s no wonder then that the narrator has a dream of being in Paris in the very next paragraph, because he and the text itself have been primed to slip from one layer of reality into another with very little resistance.
These slippages mount as he arrives at the hotel and hears “what sounded like live piano music, but [sees] no piano.” As he sits on his bed, trying to prepare for the interview, he is distracted by a memory he had on his walk to the hotel (Providence is full of ghosts for him), noting, “I was distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play, which had been put on by friends.” The uncanny feeling intensifies, crossing from the merely perceptual into bodily perception itself: “I drank down one of the bottles of water, which in my mind was the water Thomas had sipped from fifty years ago in Paris.”
On his way to Thomas’s house—walking, because he couldn’t Uber and apparently nobody thought to call a cab from the hotel, OK!—there are more opportunities for Lerner to give us Sebald with a phone:
I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.
In a scene right out of Sebald, our narrator runs into Chloe, an old friend whom he doesn’t recognize at first. This encounter is an opportunity for more reverie, more recollection as he finds out that Chloe used to date Anisa, who was, in fact, very close friends with Mia, the narrator’s wife, when they were all in college. We are then treated to a very long interlude about the narrator’s college relationship issues, his mental health struggles, and the fact that it was Anisa who took him to an art exhibition that altered the course of his life. They chat, separate. We finally arrive at Thomas’s house, a site rich with memory and reference for the narrator.
At Thomas’s house, Thomas and the narrator engage in a process of collaborative imagination that, frankly, reminded me of Ocean Vuong’s last novel, The Emperor of Gladness, which also featured a dream/imaginary exercise between a very old person of dubious mental clarity and a younger person. Except in lieu of imaginary war games, Thomas and the narrator imagine or recall a play that the narrator saw many years ago. They construct it out of language and seem, at times, to be disagreeing about something they both saw and are in fact seeing at exactly that moment. Here, again, we see a process of boundary-blurring and dissolution. The narrator and Thomas build a coherent mutual scenario until they share a mental vision of the play. It feels like the precondition of their conversation, this mutual reality, this dissolving of the space between them until he is seeing not as himself, but as Thomas.
Later in the interview, we witness Thomas beginning to conflate the narrator and Max. At first, the narrator asks him to clarify which of them he means, but he stops after a little while and lets Thomas tell the story of their trip to Hotel Arbez. It is possible for the reader (and therefore, perhaps, the narrator) to forget that when he says you, he means Max and not the narrator, except there are moments when he does mean the narrator, and not Max. It’s a wonderfully strange story he tells, one that comes back in the final section of the novel, except this time told by Max, who is angry that he’s been erased from his father’s recollection of these events.
One of the more interesting aspects of this structure is the way that the second section introduces the possibility that the first section is a prepared text delivered by the narrator at the symposium. This metafictional conversion destabilizes and draws our attention back to Lerner’s chief theme, which is the status of reality and our experience or perception of that reality. That the narrator is then confronted by a friend and peer over his “lie” to Thomas and the fraud perpetrated upon the public by concealing his deception further deepens these ideas. It also explains some of what I found so deeply irritating about that fiction of the novel, chiefly that the narrator seemed so incredibly incompetent and stupid that I found it hard to believe that I was watching a grown adult man go about life. This could be forgiven if I considered the first section of the novel a prepared text meant to self-deprecatingly present a personal failure and humiliation in a charming, amusing light.
It also explains other odd things about that first section of the novel, such as the narrator’s constant retreating into the past, describing art shows and exhibits rather than rendering any kind of real, deep detail about the personal struggles currently animating his family life. In fact, the whole first section makes sense when one considers it a kind of performance meant to protect the privacy of the narrator’s family life while performing a confession for the public. The narrator’s colleague accuses him of this during their argument: “It began with a big revelation and confession, yes. Even your tone was confessional. You were very—moved.”
Here, Lerner is roasting his Lerner-shaped narrator the way a reader skeptical of his project might roast Lerner’s own work. The friend pokes and probes into the book’s conceptual and thematic weaknesses, as if saying, “Look, I get it, I know, I know.” In fact, when she puts the screws to him, asking why he couldn’t just confess to breaking the phone, asking him every question the reader has wanted to ask of this book’s rather silly opening premise, the narrator quite literally puts his hands up: “I’d involuntarily lifted my hands, palms toward her.” Naturally, he has no answers.
Brandon Taylor’s most recent novel is Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025).