Asense​ of ‘boundlessness’ afflicts Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Adam is a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, using phone cards to call home to Kansas because he’s not settled enough to own a mobile phone. Being young abroad, open to new friendships and love affairs, writing without serious deadlines or money worries, whiling away time in museums, galleries and cafés, smoking spliffs: his life is thrilling but also panic-inducing, a condition he mitigates by taking ‘white pills’ or ‘tranquillisers’, as he calls them on the last page when he doesn’t need them anymore. They also help him to write, freeing him from the terror of the ‘pure possibility’ of the blank page, the anxiety that he might not be a real poet, or else that ‘even my fraudulence was fraudulent,’ that he is merely a drug addict, an alcoholic and a pathological liar, or just a tourist, going to bed with women who to him are interchangeable – he’s constantly ‘interleaving’ them in his mind. His poems too involve interleaving words from disparate contexts, found language, homophones and so on. As he puts it:

My research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where ‘poem’ is understood as a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.

Transcription, Lerner’s fourth novel, springs from a different kind of failure that makes reality unavailable: the narrator’s phone breaks when he drops it in the sink. Like Adam Gordon, he’s a self-conscious and neurotic poet. This time he is 45 and unnamed, from Omaha rather than Topeka, Midwestern cities being interchangeable for the general reader. He’s married and father to a daughter called Eva (‘I call her Eva in this book’). He has gone to Providence for a magazine assignment, and the broken phone means he won’t be able to FaceTime his daughter at bedtime. It also means he won’t be able to record the first session of his interview with Thomas, his nonagenarian mentor, a writer, historian and filmmaker. The sense of boundlessness is gone, bound as the narrator is by his obligations as a parent on the one hand and his duty to his elders and employers on the other. Such is the nature of middle age.

Returning to Providence occasions a rush of memories from the narrator’s university days. Leaving his hotel, he passes a bar where he sang karaoke on what his wife, Mia, considers their first date. He bumps into an old classmate now teaching at the university, which makes him recall a split from Mia when she fell in love with an older man while studying in Spain. This led to the narrator’s nervous breakdown, during which he was hospitalised for ten days and experienced auditory hallucinations. ‘It was conventional undergraduate stuff,’ he says, ‘but then, so is suicide.’ After that he became close to Mia’s roommate, Anisa. She gave him reports on Mia that turned out not to be entirely true, particularly as to her involvement with the Spaniard. Anisa and the narrator took a trip to Cambridge, where they visited Harvard’s Natural History Museum and saw the glass flowers by the Czech artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, father and son: ‘thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mould, peaches collapsing inwards on a branch, leaves curling at their edges’. The flowers are the central image of Transcription, representing cross-generational artistic collaboration and art’s power to represent and preserve (or transcribe) impermanent life. The narrator says they open him up to appreciating the beauty of natural vistas, painterly effects in sunsets and so on. He imagines them as ‘recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity; their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page’ (a sentence that in my copy of the novel requires the turning of a page to read, a nice if unintended touch).

Back in the present, the narrator doesn’t tell Thomas that his only recording device isn’t working. This leads to some light comedy between the master, who we are told is ‘among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology’ though he doesn’t use a laptop or a smartphone, and his evasive apprentice. It’s a thin conceit for a novel but an effective writing prompt. Thomas is the novel’s centre of gravity and gravitas, an old man with a playful mind given to reveries on the past but not always able to recall what he said a few pages earlier. He speaks with ‘sudden changes of scale, rapid juxtapositions of images and registers’, in quotable aphorisms:

The first experience of voice is disembodied, yes? Voices heard in utero: your mother’s voice, your father’s. The postman’s. Your sister singing ‘Ein Männlein steht im Walde’. They talk to you, ‘Hello in there,’ but also you overhear. When my uncle visits my father, for instance, my mother, carrying me, brings them their coffee. Perhaps on this tray. In utero you hear news, jokes, locutions …

But what I am saying is that radio, it is a recovery. Of the voice without the body. That like everything new, it is also ancient. The truly new touches something before the merely recent. This I like about Freud – much I don’t like – that every discovery is a rediscovery. Cinema recovers cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis. Because for all of us the first experience of language is voices travelling through the mother’s body …

There is listening beyond the cochlear, yes? And all of this is true of time, too, not only sound. Vibrations from the past or future may also be received, perhaps also through the teeth. Or through your pen, the poet as seismographer.

Anamnesis has a few meanings: in Platonic philosophy it’s the remembrance of innate knowledge acquired before birth; in medicine it’s the word for a patient’s medical history; in the Christian liturgy it’s the bit where the priest blesses the Eucharist and quotes Jesus saying ‘Do this in memory of me,’ before an altar boy like I was rings the bells; it’s also a rhetorical term for telling a story about the past, as one does in a biographical interview. Thomas tells the narrator a few things less esoteric than ideas about time communicating with us through teeth: his father was a handsome engineer and an early member of the Nazi Party; the first voice he remembers hearing on the radio was Hitler’s; during the war his family fled Augsburg for his uncle’s farm to escape Allied bombing. He is also a father and a widower, and it’s implied that his depressive wife, Virginie, killed herself. (One thinks of Adam Gordon lying to his Spanish friends that his mother is dead and his father a fascist.) Smartphones remind him of the lithium Virginie was prescribed. He keeps talking about going to Switzerland and insisting that the narrator has been there before, a sign that he’s confusing him with his son, Max.

Max is another classmate of the narrator’s. He is now a lawyer in Los Angeles and has a daughter called Emmie, who’s around the same age as Eva. In the novel’s brief second section we learn that Thomas has died and the narrator has delivered a speech at a conference in his honour, admitting that he pieced together parts of the interview, Thomas’s last, from memory. The organiser informs him that some of those gathered, Max among them, are angry at him for presenting a ‘falsified’ last testament, a gripe he rightly brushes off, though not without the usual anxious internal self-criticism. He holds out his hands to her and thinks:

The print-out of my talk was in my room, which overlooked the plaza where we sat. I had the sense that the text was, at that instant, rearranging itself – that what had been some personal remarks about my foolishness, my always acting like a clumsy student around Thomas, was recomposing itself into a startling confession I’d have to confront when I went upstairs. Maybe he would be holding the papers in his hand when I entered my room, his green eyes capable of seeing in the dark.

The memory of Thomas’s eye colour is significant because we’ve heard Thomas say he remembers his mother’s eyes the way they appear in black and white photos. So is the concept of the speech rearranging itself, because it’s the way Lerner has often spoken about art as ‘the world rearranging itself’. In his own work as an autobiographical novelist and poet, characters sometimes trade places, as when the narrator is speaking on the phone to his daughter in Thomas’s apartment and thinks of his own father calling him in 1986 from Washington DC at the time of the terrorist bombing in Paris. He tells Thomas of a dream in which he found himself in Paris, running away from a line formed outside a school where he was to pick up his daughter. Thomas ventures that the dream belonged to him, the child was Max and the beautiful woman at the school gate was Virginie. That all these people are in a way interchangeable suggests that they might also be replaceable. The constant mixing makes Lerner less a confessional writer than a metafictional one.

The third part of Transcription is a conversation in Los Angeles between the narrator and Max. It begins with Max’s long, detailed and anguished account of Emmie’s eating disorder: her general refusal to eat or, as her doctors say, her ‘failure to thrive’. This story is difficult to read if, as I am, you’re inclined to sympathise with the child in the face of her uptight yuppie parents and their campaign of perfection from the cradle via nutrition. No Pepsi or candy for you, little one! The solution they hit on to this failure to thrive – a phrase Max finds poetic in the way Adam Gordon finds ‘substance problem’ felicitous – is to fill the drawers of their house with Skittles and M&Ms, to lift the ban on Coca-Cola and to give their daughter a bowl of Lucky Charms every morning. Max comes to think of himself as a desperate Willy Wonka. Oh, and is the little girl watching too much YouTube on her iPad? To think, as Max says, her grandfather used to go to concerts with Theodor Adorno.

It’s a daunting cultural patrimony the little girl stands to inherit, not to mention her father and the narrator himself. Max’s tale turns to Thomas and his hospitalisation with Covid early in the pandemic. The episode prompts the son to air his anger at his father, things to do with his absent mother, his being sent to boarding school when they moved to America from France, his father always relating everything to Kafka, even his own daughter’s slow suicide by hunger strike, and so on. After Thomas’s recovery, Max visits him and secretly records their conversation with his phone, making him a double of the narrator, reversing his mistake. We learn of the Hotel Arbez, which straddles the border between Switzerland and France, allowing guests to be in two places at once, as it were. It’s implied that their next visit, the one Thomas was alluding to earlier in the novel, will be to a Dignitas clinic, making sense of Thomas’s earlier suggestion that the Virginie-like woman in the narrator’s dream might not want him to go to Switzerland. Again Thomas confuses his son with the narrator, and again the glass flowers are mentioned: ‘For fear of vibrations, low voices in their presence.’

I have always thought of Lerner’s first three novels as a trilogy reflecting not only stages of his life but also recent eras in American politics. Leaving the Atocha Station takes place during the Bush administration and includes an account of the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004 and the protests that followed them. One of Adam’s girlfriends asks him why he’s in Spain studying the poets who wrote under Franco rather than back home ‘studying Bush’, as if he’d be of more use to the world as a blogger for the Atlantic. 10:04 (2014) expressed the spirit of the marginally more enlightened Obama era. Its narrator sees fit to realise his non-fraudulent ambitions as a writer and teacher and to start an unconventional family with a friend (one the text suggests might be biracial, her father being from Martinique) through IVF, though they regress to the old-fashioned method; meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street protests hint at the possibility of an even more hopeful political future. Avatars of left-liberalism (Adam Gordon again), neoconservatism (a debate coach who went on to work for Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas) and proto-Trumpist reaction populate The Topeka School (2019), though it mostly takes place during the Clinton years.

Transcription is set in 2024, but Joe Biden is never mentioned, though the place where he funded a genocide is, and there’s a lot about Covid. It’s a novel about an older generation that is faltering and soon to be gone, dysfunctional youth and adults in between who are prone to fucking up (though dropping your phone in the sink is hardly a Hunter Biden-level fuck-up). Emmie’s failure to thrive might be an allegory for the novel, not this slender and subtle one, but the novel as a form, crowded out as it is by all those screens and other junk food, the broader culture contemplating offing itself in the name of AI. When Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station considers that the poetry he reads and wants to write could never effect a political revolution or overthrow the world economic system, it makes him want to swallow his year’s supply of white pills. I found all the stuff about phones and screen time in Transcription tedious and unoriginal, but I see its broader appeal. Novelists enjoy writing about these anxieties and people enjoy reading about them. They are relatable for now; Thomas likens phones to secular details in an icon painting: a newspaper, a pocketwatch, a tallow candle – details that can be burned off without a loss of meaning. That material seems to me the sugar-coating around a more bitter pill: a novel about mortality with strong suggestions of suicidal tendencies, themes that are difficult to address directly, subjects that wither with too much explanation or direct confession.

Alexander Kluge died while I was working on this review. Thomas resembles him and owns new editions of his books in German; Lerner collaborated with Kluge on a book of poems, stories and interviews called The Snows of Venice: The Lerner-Kluge-Container in 2017. When the narrator asks Thomas what he might not want to talk about in the interview, he answers: ‘Yes, but the cut, the meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dark matter. So better not to ask. Valéry says God made the world from nothing but the nothingness shines through.’ The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most troubles his characters, the sense that they are disposable and could easily be replaced. What puts the narrator in hospital for ten days but the despair that he’s been replaced by a Spaniard? Yet the method remains fertile for Lerner, his poetry and novels recording devices more sensitive than the glass flowers for projecting ourselves into the future – us, or people a lot like us.