Ben Lerner’s fourth novel, Transcription, starts off like an anxiety dream. Its unnamed narrator is interviewing his mentor, a renowned artist and scholar called Thomas, but has accidentally dropped his phone in the sink and is therefore unable to record the conversation.
Thomas is 90 years old and ailing, so this will probably be his last interview; rather than reschedule the meeting, the narrator pretends he is recording when he isn’t, and later writes up the interview from memory. During their conversation, Thomas intermittently mistakes the narrator for his own son, Max, who is of similar age to the narrator and good friends with him. It’s awkward for all concerned.
Meanwhile, the protagonist is unnerved by his temporarily phone-free existence, experiencing “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, stones stonier”; he feels “more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapour that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk”.
Both he and Max have young daughters who have been exhibiting neurotic behaviours – one is unwilling to go to school, the other has been refusing to eat – which appear to be obscurely linked to excessive screen time. Thomas has strong feelings on screen time, and recalls his horror on seeing his granddaughter absorbed in a tablet when she was very young: “Head bowed as if in prayer, this tiny creature.”
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The emotional stakes crystallise in the second half of the novel, as Max takes over the narration and provides a less flattering angle on Thomas’s backstory: his wife’s suicide; intimations of an affair; the sidelining of his family in favour of work.
Strangers are charmed by Thomas’s eccentric tendency to punctuate his conversation with arcane, encyclopaedic info-dumps, but for Max it’s exasperating, a kind of deflection. He recalls his father’s near-death during the Covid pandemic, when Max poured his heart out down the phone as Thomas lay unconscious on a ventilator, forgiving him for his parental failures. He probably couldn’t hear him, but the rant was therapeutic.
In a poignant closing chapter, Max bitterly relays a conversation in which Thomas claimed not to remember a trip they had taken together. But the reader recalls that Thomas had described the trip to the narrator, unbidden, earlier in the novel. We are left to ponder whether the old man’s tendency to confuse his son with his mentee constitutes a profound snub or just a meaningless mixup. The truth is unknowable.
This is a story of crossed wires, disconnection and anxious attachments – to fathers, father figures and digital comfort blankets. The technological aspect of Transcription will be catnip to commentators inclined to lament the perniciousness of smartphone culture, and bookish readers who share those concerns.
What does it mean that the narrator’s daughter enjoys watching ASMR unboxing videos? What does the existence of such forms of recreation say about our society? Yet the story’s core themes – the instability of memory, the crushing weight of parental responsibility – are the ordinary preoccupations of middle-aged introspection.
[ Caroline Foran on overcoming anxiety: ‘I wish I discovered ASMR sooner’Opens in new window ]
Lerner’s narrator is 45 years old, two years younger than Lerner himself. For him, being offline is inextricably bound up in a sense of the past. At one point, he takes a voice call from his daughter, with whom he usually communicates via video call: “Her voice, isolated from her image, was aged. I don’t mean that it sounded like the voice of an older person, but that the sound itself, like starlight or the light in an old painting, had travelled many years to reach me.”
He sounds rather like a vinyl junkie trying to articulate the difference between listening to music on a LP versus digital audio: that difference in the texture of the sound feels existentially significant.
The trouble with being in you mid-40s in 2026 is that you can never be quite sure whether the cultural enervation, disorientation or desensitisation you’re experiencing is attributable to the effects of digital overload or whether it would have happened anyway due to the depredations of middle age.
Not so long ago, the male protagonist of a literary novel might have channelled his midlife ennui into an affair with a younger woman, and ruminated on how their intimacy made him feel vis-a-vis the passage of time. Today, instead, he can look up a love-rival from his college days on Facebook – as Lerner’s narrator does here – and observe that, 20 years on, the guy looks essentially the same but has grown slightly fatter. Small wins, but they all count.
Houman Barekat is a critic based in London
