Ben Lerner’s anxious generations

Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2012), was an erudite year-abroad comedy about a pratfalling American poet tying himself in knots with lies during a residency in Madrid. His deceit is partly born of a desire to get laid – women pity him when he says his mother has died – but at the root of his imposture is his need to conceal the extent to which he is supported by his family; what makes the book funnier still is his failure to realise no one else even cares.

Always cutely self-referential, Lerner’s autofiction has grown steadily more intricate since his debut. 10:04 (2014) was a dizzyingly nested meta-novel about a successful New York writer with a diseased aorta; The Topeka School (2019), a decade-hopping family saga, drew on Lerner’s past as a high-school debating champion (a history he shares with Sally Rooney), as well as the lives of his parents, eminent psychologists in Kansas. His latest book, Transcription, is his shortest, most dense and slippery novel so far, comprising three riddlingly juxtaposed chapters driven by dialogue and touching on themes of technology and communication, fatherhood and friendship, dementia and self-harm. There is much to wrestle with here, yet the sense grows that the pleasures Lerner has to offer have dwindled in proportion to his work’s complexity.

In the opening pages, the narrator has just seen his primary-age daughter off to school – a daily battle on account of her anxiety – and is now on a train speeding to Kansas to interview his 90-year-old academic mentor, Thomas, an influential German author, for a final magazine profile before his memory fails. The gig immediately goes awry when the narrator contrives to break his phone before they meet; with no backup recording device to hand – and seemingly no possibility of obtaining one – he decides to pretend to tape their conversation, somehow unable simply to explain what has happened.

As soon as Thomas begins talking – about Freud, Plato, Hitler, psychoacoustics, angels, the death of his mentally ill wife and his puzzlement that his granddaughter’s generation are allowed online – the reader can’t help but laugh at the impossibility of trying to commit his digressively unruly remarks to memory, as the narrator hopes. This is classic Lerner territory – the spectacle of a needless lie spiralling beyond control – but where similar conduct in Atocha had a plausible psychological rationale, the set-up in Transcription seems merely an outlet for the novel’s musing on what the smartphone has done to our minds. Newly bereft, the narrator finds himself more keenly attuned to “silicates glittering in the asphalt… the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk”, a sensation “indistinguishable from mild intoxication”.

The phrase is telling, given that the narrator of Atocha, operating without even a brick phone in the prelapsarian early noughties, was likewise awakened to the beauty of his surroundings (“streetlights, fountains…”) by smoking dope. In Transcription, the pot-hazed wisdom of Lerner’s youth has turned into wistful analogue evangelism played entirely straight; it’s hard not to feel a neurotic stoner is better company on the page than fractious middle-aged academics worrying about screen time and sugar.

But the reader’s entertainment isn’t Lerner’s first priority here. When, during his interview, Thomas asks to be reminded of the name of the narrator’s daughter – a sign of his creeping dementia – the narrator replies, “I call her Eva in this book”: a strange answer, breaking the fourth wall to no purpose I could discern. Just as disconcerting is the way the narrator continually alludes to the suicide of a friend, of whom we imagine more might be said; but nothing is, and we’re left wondering if it’s subtle characterisation, baggage too awful to unpack, or merely Lerner chafing against his more humdrum novelistic duties. By the book’s final page – a gnomic excerpt from a letter by the 19th-century Czech glass artist Leopold Blaschka – it has become clear that conventional satisfactions aren’t the point, which isn’t to say they’re entirely absent. 

The novel catches light in its third section, a riveting heart-to-heart between the narrator and his college friend Max, Thomas’s son, who describes his young daughter’s refusal to eat, and his inability to ask for help from his father, who once met news of Max’s wife’s cancer scare by saying: “Ah, bios, opsis – what a beautiful combination. Life, sight,” before launching into a monologue on medieval medicine and the invention of lipstick. The exchange between the narrator and Max lends emotional heft to the bewildering digressions of the interview scene, where we already experienced Thomas’s “sudden changes of scale, rapid juxtapositions of images and registers”; now we see, for good and ill, what it has meant to live as the son of this capacious mind. Some brilliant passages showcase Lerner’s gifts of narrative timing, not least a bruisingly bittersweet account of deathbed goodbyes over the phone during lockdown.

Overall, though, Transcription feels overburdened, grappling with three generations of filial strife in fragmentary microcosm. The inscrutable miseries of its youngest characters cast the deepest shadow. While the protagonist of The Topeka School can square up to another dad in the playground – angered that his daughters can’t enjoy the equipment because the other man’s son is aggressively running riot while he scrolls obliviously on his phone – the fathers in Transcription have no such bogeymen on which to pin their children’s woes. Max’s daughter, addicted to online “unboxing” videos, glugs down a smoothie only to vomit it up theatrically on the kitchen floor; he wonders if she refuses food because she knows “privilege involves the immiseration of others”.

I thought again of Leaving the Atocha Station here. In one of its funniest scenes, the narrator eases his nerves at a party by pulling his face into a “political” look, “insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the frontlines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null”. He is fraudulently weaponising his own self-loathing anxiety that “real life” is happening elsewhere. As Lerner’s protagonists age, it’s no surprise if they bequeath that worry to the next generation. Nor is it shocking that such a state of affairs should lend itself not to farce, but tragedy.

Transcription by Ben Lerner is published by Granta (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £12.74 (15% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Beowulf Sheehan