The Feeling of Becoming Less and Less of a Person
Let’s hazard an assertion: On or about June 2007, human character changed. To be more exact—because the phrase human character now feels antique—we might say instead that the human sensorium changed. By this we don’t necessarily mean a sudden and definite alteration in how we perceive the world—in the forms, sources, and amount of information we absorb, and in how we conduct our relations with parents, children, spouses, partners, mentors, friends. Yet a transition was set in motion, differentiating life before the omnipresent smartphone and life after, and dating its onset to the birth of the iPhone seems apt.
The above is a loose homage to words that Virginia Woolf wrote slightly more than a century ago about the collapse of Victorian gender and class norms, a shift that she placed more arbitrarily, with half-ironic playfulness, in December 1910, a decade and a half before her essay appeared. In both cases, the mutation seems at once massive and slippery, glaring and subtle; the effects are phenomena without edges, pervasive yet noticeable only when caught by middle-distance memory. Few things are as hard to discern as what was different about the recent past.
Capturing changes like these calls less for history than for the oldest of forms, fable. Not far into Ben Lerner’s Transcription, you realize that a fable is, in fact, what you have entered. His new novel may be set roughly two years ago, and in a highly specific and contemporary milieu, but it is also about a man in the middle of his life, away from home, signposts vanished and maps lost. Having slipped into a different world, he must now wonder where, if anywhere, he might feel at home. Only the reality-bending qualities of fable, perhaps, can evoke the threshold in human cognition that was crossed just a short while ago and convey the mystery of how or if we have remained ourselves on the other side of that change.
Transcription is the fourth novel by a writer who is not solely, or even primarily, a novelist. Lerner is also a poet and critic, and his novels are written as intermittent and experimental eruptions of engagement with some matter of urgent public concern. They fit within the quasi-biographical, reference-rich, largely plotless genre that the 2010s came to know as “autofiction.” Yet Lerner’s version, which has the feel of theory in a different mode, has tilted slightly toward a much older tradition, the novel of ideas. Each successive novel has become less indirect about its subject. His debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, published in 2011, is a comic, cerebral coming-of-age novel about a young poet in the era of the War on Terror. Pressing issues claim the foreground more overtly three years later in 10:04, in which Lerner evokes life in the shadow of climate change, and in The Topeka School, published in 2019. In that book, his characters confront the decline of American public speech—its degeneration into varieties of unreason and the proto-fascist violence that follows.
[From the October 2019 issue: Ben Lerner, portraitist of talkative men]
The novels’ topicality is leavened by a critic’s erudition and a poet’s facility for turning abstractions into images. The protagonists of these books partially resemble Lerner himself: a male writer from Kansas, the product of an intellectual family and an elite education, eventually a resident of New York City. These figures seem to offer an internal portrait of the author as well. He’s hyper-articulate and earnest, though prone to disconcerting fits of duplicity and rage. He’s also almost paralyzingly aware of being the beneficiary of a wealthy nation’s tangible and intangible resources, and aware that those resources aren’t sufficient for a life lived well. Taken together, Lerner’s first three novels have the contours of a trilogy, installments in a collective biography whose theme is the evolving disquiet, even anguish, of late-imperial America.
Transcription is and isn’t like these predecessors. Lerner’s alter ego has returned, unnamed here and now firmly middle-aged, and the terrain is still that of cosmopolitan, credentialed, coastal-urban white America, steadily more embattled and self-doubting. But the book, divided into three encounters—conversations, really—has an unusually stark quality that gives it the feel of a parable. The subject matter is also different. Lerner here turns to media theory, despite the risk that this might seem both in the clouds and mundane: He’s training his attention on the phones in our pockets, on something very small and yet boundless in its effects.
[Read: The unhappy literary families of the internet age]
Here Lerner’s dual talents give him a unique purchase. The “internet novel” of recent years has tried very hard to sound just like the internet—to compete with, parody, or mimic the deadpan, knowing wit and quick cuts of online discourse. Lerner’s media theory is both more deliberately, novelistically banal and more freely lyrical. Transcription is indeed about those phones and their most literal, pedestrian appearances in our lives. At the same time, it is about how they have transformed the very guise of the world, which means that the novel is about change itself, about what living through epochal transition is like. Trying to explore this process is a project that lacks the dignity or sense of emergency associated with confronting climate disaster or authoritarianism. The experience is happening everywhere; it’s the fish’s theory of water. Helping us recognize the atmosphere we’re immersed in has always been Lerner’s talent.
Transcription opens with its protagonist on a train to Providence, Rhode Island. He’s en route to interview his former college mentor, Thomas, a renowned German media theorist and artist, for a magazine on the occasion of his 90th birthday. It is early 2024. Masking and rapid testing are still on his mind. While on the train, he texts with his wife about their daughter’s school anxiety; listens to a talk that his mentor gave half a century earlier; falls asleep and has a disturbing dream about trying to pick up his daughter at school and being turned away. Tugged at by both the young and the old, he starts to feel unmoored. At his hotel, preparing for the interview, he accidentally drops his phone—which he was counting on to record the interview—into a clogged sink. It goes “black mirror.”
[From the April 2016 issue: Nicholas Dames on the new fiction of solitude]
He has been sundered from the world, unable to locate an Apple Store where he could replace the phone, unable to call his mentor to apologize in advance for being late, unable to make a promised FaceTime call to his daughter. He’s as inaccessible as the dead. On his way to the interview, he experiences the shift as a transfiguring estrangement, “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier.” Unmediated by a screen, he is seized by an almost unbearably sharp feeling of presence, while he is also moving back into his own deviceless past, as if the Providence of his youth has summoned itself from the underworld. We have entered the miraculous, uncannily familiar, possibly treacherous land of fable. Nothing captures the force of technology better than an enchantment that removes it, however temporarily. But the scene is also comically ordinary; he is just a man who cannot open his Contacts.
Defamiliarization, in Transcription, always swerves back into the familiar, into realist farce. When he arrives at Thomas’s house, an incoherent shame seizes him, and he cannot admit to his mentor that his phone is unusable. His frail interlocutor begins to speak—elegantly, passionately—about his own youth in Hitlerite Germany and the fascist radio speeches that form his earliest memories, but his words are not being captured. And as this unrecorded rhapsody progresses, dementia weaves its spell. Thomas begins to confuse his young mentee and interviewer with his own son, mixing fragments of family wounds and recriminations into his reverie, as if he’s forgotten that he’s being interviewed. Lerner’s protagonist plays along politely, anxiously. What else can he do? The interview will have to begin again tomorrow, with a new phone, in any case. He fails to confess that nothing has been recorded. Thomas’s sibylline, disorienting words slip into the void.
We later learn, indirectly, that the promised tomorrow never comes—that Thomas’s death has intervened, and the recorded interview never occurs. The nonevent is the void with which the novel’s following two sections contend. The protagonist, we find out, has tried to fill it by publishing his conversation with Thomas as if it were a verbatim last interview, and the revelation of this imposture shocks not only Thomas’s other acolytes—a “deepfake,” one calls it, made under “false pretenses”—but also Thomas’s son, Max, the protagonist’s close friend from college. Their anger makes clear the scale of the protagonist’s oedipal betrayal.
In the novel’s final section, other crossed signals and cross-generational misperceptions emerge. Max now speaks, almost entirely uninterrupted, about his own failed communication with his father in recent years. He describes Thomas’s near death from COVID in early 2020, during which a nurse held a smartphone to his ear so that Max could say a final goodbye of forgiveness and apology, a call that Thomas may or may not have heard. Max also recounts a later visit with his recovering father, in the course of which he surreptitiously recorded their conversation on a phone—another deception. All of this is framed by Max’s narration of his young daughter’s life-threatening eating disorder and the treatment that saved her: She was allowed to eat while glued to her iPad, watching the bizarre micro-genre of unboxing videos. Max relates all of this with a lucid matter-of-factness, because he is baffled by it.
One might take Transcription’s final section as Max’s absolution—tacit, maybe even a bit grudging—of his friend, and his father’s mentee, for his transgression. Here the novel comes close to a kind of mythic resolution, one that lets us glimpse a deep, unappeasable desire: to have the dead, or the dead’s appointed representatives, forgive us, so that we may forgive them for having left us. Lerner, however, never lets us forget how entangled this need is with power cords and phones and screens, all the ganglia of modern, networked life—and how these devices are both bridge and barrier between parents, children, and grandchildren.
As Lerner’s alter ego has aged through his four novels, he has acquired not just offspring but a profound unease about the different world that the next generation already inhabits, one that the parent not only can’t control but can’t even apprehend, as if the child’s receptive organs are attuned to as yet unnamed hues and higher frequencies. Meanwhile, the world of aging parents threatens to vanish unrecorded. In the remembered/fabricated interview, Thomas provides a media metaphor for this—a “split screen” in which the young and old exist in parallel spaces. “The question,” Thomas adds, “is how to depict the historical changes in atmosphere.” Transcription is an attempt at an answer.
Historical transitions have magically disorienting qualities. They also are a matter of prosaic, minute negotiations. Lerner’s characters always have thickly rendered intellectual lives, but in Transcription their intellection is directed, more than ever before, toward what you might call “getting used to it,” finding ways to acclimatize to that new atmosphere. To the communication-and-storage devices in their pockets that, far more than any postmodern philosophy, have erased the feeling of embodied, subjective presence in the world. To the anxiety disorders of their children, which have the portentous mystery of an oracle’s riddle. To the garbling, which the novel relays in its opening section, of collective social-historical memory.
In this way at least, Transcription is traditional. When fiction contends with technological change, it often situates that change in the context of generational loss. Marcel Proust’s reflection on the telephone, in the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, happens during a glitchy long-distance call with the narrator’s grandmother, in which her disembodied voice, reduced by telephony to tympanic vibration, becomes a premonition of the grave. So too in Lerner. Parents and mentors die, traces of them captured (or not) only in the fragile black box of the device. Children seem accessible only through it. The middle-generation experience, the bidirectional mourning that comes of being split between the vanishing and the emergent, preoccupies Transcription.
[Read: Ben Lerner on envisioning the novel like a museum]
If Lerner has an answer about how to acclimate, it’s in Transcription’s turn away from the narration of consciousness, all of those second thoughts and dreamy associations that have until now been his fiction’s primary mode. Its final section is only speech—simultaneously confessional, therapeutic, and testimonial—as if Lerner needed a form detached from the single mind. We are left just with voices, and those voices, in the novel’s subtle and canny repetitions, begin to merge with one another, becoming polyphonic. Phrases and images from earlier in the novel return, echoed, no longer assignable to particular individuals.
It’s a way of capturing the tremendous de-selving of the networked world. In this novel, one generation will depart before needing to adjust to it. One generation will never have known anything else. And one generation might be able to record its happening, to serve as the seismograph of a cognitive-technological shift. This is what one recalls of Transcription: not an action, not even really a scene, but a situation—the feeling of becoming less and less of a person. It’s a hollow feeling, but strangely also a feeling of heightened sensitivity to almost everything, including your own disappearance. In all of the novel’s layered voices, one can hear the trembling of elegy.
Early in the book, Lerner’s protagonist recalls a visit to the famous glass flowers in the Harvard Museum of Natural History: small, painfully fragile artifacts, mimicking nature with hallucinatory detail, suspended carefully from wires. He notices—or imagines; it is impossible to tell—that they are “vibrating imperceptibly.” He thinks, “The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity.” They are like seismographs, but also like phones, like data stored in the cloud, in the air—“air looms,” Thomas jokingly puns at one point. The world, in Transcription, is becoming air: the depersonalized, dematerialized, impalpable crossing of digital signals. The glass flowers, however, suggest that art can still respond to fluctuations in, and of, the air. Lerner’s novel comes as close as we can yet imagine to honoring their delicate way of registering a change that is everywhere around us—and that is making nonsense of the difference between inside us and outside us.
This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Feeling of Becoming Less and Less of a Person.”