TRANSCRIPTION, by Ben Lerner
Among a reporter’s greatest fears, along with misspelling a name or being duped by a source, is that their recording apparatus will fail during an interview. And yet some of the best, like the longtime New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross, refused to use such contraptions at all, feeling they were no substitute for an alert human ear.
Ben Lerner’s new novel, “Transcription” — slim as an early-model iPad, so slim it’s technically a novella — palpates this ever-more-tender boundary between human and machine. As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it’s about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life.
“Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating when the small waves hit them,” the unnamed narrator thinks, suspecting someone of eavesdropping on an old-fashioned phone conversation. “You call this fiction, but it is more.”
And what is literature if not eavesdropping?
Lerner, 47, is one of the more celebrated writers of a generation whose writers have mostly ceased to be celebrities — and, as if to make up for this cultural diminishment, tend to center … writers very much like themselves. (Some might say autofiction has run amok; others might shrug that self-representation, as in online profiles and avatars, is our moment’s only shared truth.)
His second novel, “10:04,” cited “Back to the Future” and had a plot punctuated with artificial insemination and flanked by hurricanes. His third, “The Topeka School,” which returned to the alter-ego protagonist “Adam Gordon” of his debut, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a poet, and boy, does he know it, publishing an 86-page bound essay on the genre’s discontents.
And he is a son of Harriet Lerner, the psychologist and author of, most famously, “The Dance of Anger.”
Reading “Transcription,” I kept thinking of Momma Lerner’s discussion of how two people experiencing conflict in a relationship subconsciously pull in a third to deflect the tension, and realized the title here might just as well be “Triangulation.”
The book is divided into three parts, each titled after a hotel: the first in Providence, R.I., where an unnamed narrator is on assignment for an unnamed magazine, to interview Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual whose earliest aural memory is hearing “Hitler’s voice, rising and rising in pitch,” on the radio.
The night before their appointment the narrator drops his smartphone, containing the voice memo app along with so much else of his life, in the undrained hotel sink of his room, leaving it “a small, wounded animal” that he cannot bring back to life in time. He will be left to his own devices, as people used to say without arch air quotes: the cache of his own brain.
Once you start seeing triangles, it becomes hard to stop. Thomas has a son, Max, who was a year ahead of the narrator in college. (“Maybe you were the real son,” Max suggests later to his father’s mentee, “maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger.”) Max and the narrator are each married, with one daughter, like the characters in the old “Schoolhouse Rock” song “Three Is a Magic Number”; Thomas seems to represent past, present and future all at once.
The short second section stops in Madrid, where Lerner and his fictional stand-ins have both traveled on scholarships. Thomas has died, and the narrator is castigated there after revealing in a lecture that his “last interview ever” with the old man, parts of which have already been quoted and reproduced elsewhere, were reconstructed from memory. “A deepfake,” a curator scolds.
The third section moves to Los Angeles, and back in time, through reminiscence, with Max describing how his child was afflicted with what doctors called avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. “‘My daughter won’t eat’ becomes ARFID,” he notes. “The acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it’s science!”
Thomas was a screen skeptic, comparing the girl to “The Hunger Artist” or pre-Christian ascetics. Yet watching unboxing videos — consumption!— soothes her into being able to nourish herself again. (ARFID turns out to be no match for A.S.M.R.) And when Thomas is hospitalized, it is a screen, and a kind nurse brokering FaceTime, that empowers Max to impart the meaningful final messages that, in actual face-to-face time, he is unable to deliver. In person, he felt erased, a ghost; relating this, “Transcription” becomes a familiar story about the dynamic between an accomplished but distant father and the son who cannot quite reach him.
Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete’s command of different, overlapping genres, is winning.
And yet “Transcription” is more of an exercise than a sporting event, like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball, the — yep! — triangle with its oracular messages bobbing within.
TRANSCRIPTION | By Ben Lerner | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 144 pp. | $25
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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