Ben Lerner’s Transcription Is a Labyrinth of Allusions
Early on in Transcription, Ben Lerner’s new novel, the narrator finds himself without a cell phone. (Or more precisely, without a working cell phone: He knocked his into a sink full of water just before leaving his hotel.) As he walks through the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, phonelessness becomes a state of extreme presence. He’s “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.” He is also returned to his past. Two and a half decades ago, he was at college in Providence; now, unable to contact the world beyond—unable to “swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc.”—he is thrown back on his memories. He sees in a passer-by one of his old professors; he expects his fortysomething wife, back home in New York, to appear as the student she once was.
It’s a quintessentially Lerner-like state. In The Topeka School (2019), for example, a married middle-aged man beginning an affair is at the same time the teenage boy he once was, gleeful to have “made it to third base.” On other occasions in Lerner’s fiction, more mysteriously, characters become other people or even other creatures, as well as themselves. The narrator of 10:04 (2014) is entered by the “alien intelligence” of the octopus he has just eaten and takes on its “succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects.” In these moments, Lerner is at his remarkable best, his expanded field of vision making the mundane at once vivid and otherworldly.
For the narrator of Transcription, being without a phone is a gateway to the sublime, an experience of almost unpleasant intensity. It’s also extremely inconvenient. The narrator is no longer a responsibility-free college student. It’s evening, and he had promised to call his tween daughter before her bedtime. He’s on his way to interview his 90-year-old mentor, Thomas, a famous historian of technology and culture, for a magazine; he had been planning to record their conversation on his phone. He can’t call to postpone because, of course, he doesn’t know Thomas’s phone number. For reasons he doesn’t articulate to himself, the narrator cannot imagine telling Thomas about his waterlogged phone. Instead, he decides, he’ll frame their conversation tonight as preparatory, laying the groundwork for the real interview, which will take place the following morning—once he’s had a chance to go to the Apple store to buy a replacement phone.
His plan doesn’t work. Thomas reasonably points out that rehearsing a conversation they plan to have tomorrow will make them sound like “bad actors.” By now, the narrator is so hemmed in by half-truths and untruths that there seems only one course of action left to him. He takes the dead phone from his pocket and puts it face down on the table between them. “We are recording,” he says.
In this moment, the narrator resembles the narrator of Lerner’s 2011 debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, who regularly finds himself telling lies that allow him to escape the awkwardness of the present at the cost of greater awkwardness, or worse, later. Will Thomas, or the magazine, find out about the nonexistent recording? Will the narrator be able to come back tomorrow, new phone in hand, and maneuver his interviewee into having the conversation that he needs to capture? Will he get away with it?
The rest of Transcription answers some of these questions, although not through anything that could be regarded as a plot. The novel, which is under 150 pages, is divided into three sections, each oriented around a conversation between the narrator and one other person: first Thomas; then Rosa, a curator at a Spanish museum; then Thomas’s son, Max. There are uncanny correspondences between the events of the different sections: Experiences mirror one another and characters unknowingly mimic each other’s words. Intricate and unsettling, Transcription is a book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner’s refined, allusive fiction. It’s also a compelling exploration of how this hyper-literate sensibility, its intense interest in overlap and resonance, can lead us astray.
Transcription reproduces the narrator’s unrecorded conversation with Thomas, but we never find out whether he managed to return the next day with a phone. Not long after, Thomas dies. The second section of Transcription, which unfolds over just 12 pages, takes place in Madrid, at the end of a conference celebrating Thomas’s life and work, organized by Rosa. In the lecture he has just given at the conference, the narrator recounted for the first time the story of the broken phone, the faked recording—a story he sees as an “embarrassing personal anecdote.” Rosa, however, regards it a confession to serious wrongdoing: lying first to Thomas and then, implicitly, to the world, by faking the interview that was the first Thomas had given in decades, and his last before he died. Everyone is shocked and angry, especially Thomas’s son, Rosa tells the narrator. “Trust me,” she says, “Max is furious.”
But in Max’s conversation with the narrator, which takes up the entirety of the book’s third section, we see little evidence of this fury. Their conversation is closer to a monologue, with Max dismissing or cutting off the narrator’s occasional responses. He never mentions the narrator’s debacle with his broken phone, or the magazine article it produced. But he does offer a different view of Thomas and his relationships, one that changes the way we see the events of the first section and the narrator’s role in them.
The narrator and Max have been friends since college. Now, they live on opposite sides of the country—Max is a lawyer in Los Angeles—and we get the sense that they no longer talk much. Nevertheless, they have had to reckon with the same common problems of midlife: how to be a parent to a struggling child, how to be a child to a declining parent. (For both, that parent is Thomas, Max’s biological father and the narrator’s intellectual one.) The narrator’s daughter is “flirting with what the school counselor called ‘school refusal.’” Max’s daughter, Emmie, stopped eating around the age of eight.
The first half of Max’s monologue, one of the most gripping stretches of the book, relates his family’s various attempts to overcome what doctors diagnose as Emmie’s “ARFID—avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder.” Finally, Emmie discovers unboxing videos online, specifically ones in which women gasp and coo and tap the packages with long fingernails before opening them to reveal little stuffed toys. Glued to these, she is suddenly able to eat again. “The screen screened her from our gaze,” Max tells the narrator. The videos “filter out the world and give you these little buzzes and clicks in its place […] ASMR treats ARFID.”
Since Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner has written about how twenty-first century technology mediates our existence, and there’s no novelist better at it: To read his descriptions of characters’ interactions online is both to recognize one’s own experience and to see new aspects of it. Emmie’s immersion in the unboxing videos appears to be the opposite of the narrator’s experience of being yanked away from his broken phone and into the material world. Yet the intensity the narrator feels is only possible because of how often he, like Emmie, is protected from the world by a screen: Experiencing the world without a phone, having previously had one, is entirely different from never having had a phone at all. Technology makes new modes—and in Emmie’s case, new cures—possible, but there is no way of returning to what it was like to live before that technology existed.
The very contemporary cure to Emmie’s disorder is, Max admits, “not untroubling”—especially since he, like the narrator, worries that his daughter’s difficulties are a response to contemporary ills. The narrator wonders aloud to Thomas whether his daughter’s anxiety about going to school is displaced anxiety about “the disasters of the world. Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke […] the war—the wars—the political—.” Max speculates that Emmie intuits her life of privilege “involves the immiseration of others.” Is refusing to eat a way of refusing such a life? Or perhaps it’s because she’s “registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism?”
Transcription resists such arguments as much as it offers them. Emmie’s distress, and the distress of the narrator’s daughter, may indeed be produced by present-day horrors. On the other hand, being born at a different time might not have been any less destabilizing for them. When the narrator was at college, life was largely offline. Even so, those were not halcyon days: The narrator had a breakdown and spent a period in hospital; Max was “very depressed junior year.” Thomas was born in Germany in 1934, to a father who “joined the party very early.” The narrator recalls one of his professors telling the class that the locket around her neck, which she had worn since the late 1960s, contained a cyanide capsule—“for use in case of nuclear war.” One of the unsettling things about Transcription is how its characters repeatedly draw conclusions that other parts of the book seem to undermine. We are not, it suggests, very good at understanding our place in history.
Lerner’s novels have been widely celebrated as autofiction. Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School, which Lerner has described as a trilogy, all center on a character whose biography is very close to his own. But Lerner has always incorporated the stories of other characters, often in something approximating their own voices. In 10:04, we hear complicated episodes from the pasts of the narrator’s father, of his co-worker, of his best friend’s stepfather. Long sections of The Topeka School are narrated by the main character’s parents. This quality of Lerner’s novels isn’t so different from his characters’ sense of being simultaneously their present and past selves, themselves and others.
This is as much a moral commitment as a formal one. Lerner’s works are both loved and criticized for their cerebral nature, but at their heart is the belief that our stories—that we ourselves—exist in and through one another. In Leaving the Atocha Station, the main character is self-absorbed and self-deluding; among his delusions is his belief that he can hold himself apart from others. Despite his near-constant lies, feints, and evasions, his two quasi-girlfriends understand him much better than he does himself. 10:04 ends with the narrator imagining himself “in the second person plural” and offering to the reader a reworking of a line from an early version of Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.” Lerner, who is also a poet, writes extensively about Whitman in his book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry, and Whitman’s desire to create an “I” capacious enough to hold every American within it.
Lerner is too perceptive a writer, and too aware of his own position as a highly educated white male American, not to acknowledge the potential problems of speaking for and as others. In his novels, there are usually reminders that we aren’t hearing other characters’ stories entirely in their own voices, but rather filtered through the consciousness and memory—sometimes even the language—of the Lerner-like writer-protagonist. The Topeka School in particular offers persistent evidence of the violence that can result from boundaries carelessly or willfully blurred. The Hatred of Poetry explores the limits as well as the possibilities of attempting to marry the individual and the collective in poetry.
Even so, Lerner’s previous novels suggest, paying attention to our porousness is valuable: It attunes us to the depth of our personal relationships, as well as to the reality of an interconnected, globalized world. It also makes new worlds possible. This attitude is given the most concrete form, in 10:04, by the narrator’s feelings about the Park Slope Food Co-op, “the oldest and largest active food cooperative in the country.” Like many of its members, the narrator enjoys complaining about the co-op. Such complaints are a way of demonstrating that you aren’t “foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on.” Even so, the narrator tells us, he doesn’t see the co-op as “morally trivial.” It makes labor “shared and visible,” it doesn’t “carry products that [are] the issue of openly evil conglomerates.” It helps run a soup kitchen and donates money to rebuild a destroyed homeless shelter nearby. Collectivity is imperfect, but in the face of untrammeled capitalism, environmental collapse, and rising authoritarianism, it’s our best hope.
Transcription pokes holes in this view. Its narrator (a writer, in his forties, lives in New York, went to Brown, etc.) is the obvious stand-in for Lerner, but it’s Thomas who most resembles Lerner’s previous fiction. We are told that Thomas talks in “sudden changes of scale, rapid juxtapositions of images and registers”—an apt description of Lerner’s own narrative style. Like Lerner’s novels, Thomas has a tendency to dissolve boundaries between individuals. When the narrator tells Thomas about a troubling dream he had on the train to Providence, Thomas claims the dream as his own, as being about his son and his dead wife rather than about the narrator’s daughter. The dream “becomes social,” he says—and isn’t this a good definition of “politics,” “when we sit around the fire and make the dream social”?
The ability to dissolve boundaries in this way, to make the individual social, is what originally drew the narrator to Thomas. During his breakdown in college, he started hearing voices. Thomas’s insistence that “we all hear phantom voices […] hallucination, too, is social” was one of the many things he said and did, the narrator tells us, that “might have saved me.” Yes, there are numerous moments in their unrecorded interview that are unpleasantly destabilizing—but aren’t those just the disorientations of Thomas’s nonagenarian memory loss? Or perhaps the narrator’s own twitchiness about being separated from his phone?
Max’s depiction of Thomas suggests otherwise. “There was no point, none, in telling him about [Emmie’s] struggles,” he says to the narrator. “Just as there was no point, there had never been any point, in telling him about my own personal problems.” Some time ago, he recalls, his partner had a biopsy to test for cancer; when Max confided his fears, Thomas’s response—at least, in Max’s memory—was “Ah, bios, opsis—what a beautiful combination. Life, sight. Did you know that it is al-Zahrawi in the eleventh century who first uses a needle to puncture and examine the material. He also, they say, invented lipstick, but this is disputed.” As a parody of Lerner’s own tendencies, it’s a darkly funny moment—but the concern it betrays is real. Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’s words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’s own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’s upbringing is “silly.”
Max’s monologue sharpens our attention to the cruelties of Thomas’s approach, but his own approach is not much better. His conversational style is direct and focused, strikingly different to Thomas’s. But he, too, seems uninterested in the narrator’s experiences of the world, unless they happen to match exactly Max’s own. In his conversations with both father and son, the narrator is bullied into disavowing his memories when they don’t conform to those of his interlocutors. Thomas and Max only want to see correspondences, real or imagined, between themselves and others, between their own interests and the interests of other people. They turn away from the particularity—the reality—of the person in front of them.
Transcription seems to warn against a focus on correspondence at the expense of particularity. Yet the novel is itself full of strange patterns and repetitions. Thomas and Max, separately, refer to Thomas’s final conversation as an “exit interview”; the narrator and Max use exactly the same phrase to describe the experience of sudden fear (“It was as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck”). The narrator produces his phone and tells Thomas that it’s recording; a couple of years previously, Max had pressed record on his phone and hidden it away, secretly capturing his father’s stories. What are we to make of such connections, given the novel’s critique of Thomas and Max’s insistent connection-seeking? A work of fiction—of any art—always asks us to make connections between its different parts. By doing so more explicitly than most, Transcription reminds us of the difference between interpreting art and interpreting that messier business, life.