When we meet the unnamed narrator of Ben Lerner’s latest novel, he is holding an unread book and toying with his phone. The setting is a train to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is going to interview an eminent German polymath named Thomas, his old mentor from his college days there. It’s 2024; Thomas has just turned ninety. It’s possible that this will be their last meeting, not to mention Thomas’s last published interview. The narrator needs to think up a good opening question, but he can’t focus on the great man’s latest book because he has a seat “facing opposite the direction of travel…. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am ‘facing the past.’” Instead he texts with his wife, then dozes and has an uneasy dream.

By the end of this unemphatic three-page sequence, Transcription has dealt out most of the cards that it will go on to manipulate with some dazzling flourishes and much use of misdirection. There’s a kernel of drama—the looming encounter with a figure with whom the narrator has a charged, quasi-filial relationship—and there are already three generations in play, with the narrator, who’s forty-five, having to worry about all of them. (The exchange of texts with his wife implies that their daughter has been dabbling in “school refusal”; he wears a mask on the train, in part, it turns out, because Thomas narrowly survived the Covid pandemic.) There’s an emphasis on testimony and its transmission, on technological mediation—his main concern about the interview is that he’ll fail to record it on his iPhone—and there’s close notation of such actions as enlarging a QR code or sending a thumbs-up emoji.

Behind the efficient scene setting, however, there’s also a slightly outrageous riff on a text that has acquired a status approaching the sacred. Whether or not the narrator—as opposed to Lerner—is aware of it, his description of barreling along backwards while “facing the past” (a phrase he picks up again a few paragraphs later) puts him in the same position as the angel in Walter Benjamin’s cryptic last essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which he wrote as a refugee in France in the winter of 1939–1940:

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past…. A storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Lerner is fond of this passage. It’s quoted in his novel 10:04 (2014) beneath a reproduction of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the print that Benjamin was ostensibly describing. A few pages earlier Ben, the narrator of 10:04, uses terms from an equally famous essay by Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (as it’s now known in English), while browsing in the Whole Foods in Union Square, where people are panic-buying supplies after a storm warning. “It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened,” he observes of a tub of instant coffee, “lending it a certain aura.” The narrator of Transcription—who seems to be a poet-professor and like all of Lerner’s protagonists a version of Lerner himself—is just as prone to applying language from his professional life to ordinary life in this way.^*

Here, though, the allusion reads less as coming from a character—what kind of person likens himself to the angel of history?—than as something overlaid by the novelist, which raises questions. Is it mood music for the approaching interview? (The narrator will later describe Thomas as being “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.”) Does the novel mean to handle its themes in a Benjaminian fashion, or is it pointing at frightening congruences between the crises of Benjamin’s times and ours? Either way, it’s an audaciously mock-heroic image. Benjamin’s angel is a being out of Kafka and Jewish mysticism. The uppermost layer of debris before him comes from the Hitler–Stalin Pact and a world war. Lerner’s narrator is a figure on a scale closer to our own: a screen-addled bumbler faced with what one pictures as a menacing heap of Covid masks, air quality index reports, iPhone chargers, and MAGA hats. Hurtling along backwards, he worries about throwing up.

How do you turn experience into writing, Adam Gordon wonders in Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), without reducing uneventful stretches of time to “a slow dissolve between scenes”? Leaving them out isn’t the answer: no one lives at that pitch of intensity. And more significant episodes are a problem too: they’re “ready-made literature,” oddly generic and hedged in by clichés. Why is there this “incommensurability of language and experience”? Does Adam experience it in a particularly virulent form as a result of “a damaged life of pornography and privilege,” or is it just the way things are for everyone? Whatever the case, he promises himself, “I would never write a novel.”

Adam is a young American poet on a fellowship in Madrid in 2003–2004, and although his musings aren’t offered with the self-seriousness of Stephen Dedalus—they are his commentary on lurking in his apartment smoking hash and intermittently firing up his laptop to check the news from Iraq and/or to look at porn—they’re a neat sketch of the contortions the times demanded from writers of his training and temperament. Like Lerner, who was born in 1979, Adam is a creature of the interregnum between the late-twentieth-century age of irony and pastiche and whatever age it is that we’re living through today. Of his third collection of poems, Mean Free Path (2010), Lerner has said that he was looking for “a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling.” A similar wish had until recently been animating David Foster Wallace’s fiction and nonfiction, and was already animating—with very different results—Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2009–2011).

Lerner’s slightly younger cohort of writers has also had to confront this problem (the problem, as Wallace formulated it, of wanting to be more earnest and direct without throwing out the idea inherited from modernism that only formal ingenuity of one kind or another can break through prefabricated feelings) in a world that was losing interest and moving on to different problems. Atocha was published a year after David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) and a year before the first installment of My Struggle appeared in English. Fiction’s energies were draining into memoir and social media. There was growing demand for a fantasy of unmediated authenticity and immediacy. Concerns about the politics of representation had in some cases begun to mutate into a generalized wariness about imagining what it’s like to be somebody else. Thanks to notable reprints of Renata Adler, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Chris Kraus, and the rise to prominence of writers like Maggie Nelson and Sheila Heti, the generically unstable first-person exploration of subjectivity, especially female subjectivity, was coming to make smart-alecky male novelists look outmoded.

One of the qualities that has helped Lerner’s writing flourish anyway, under these conditions, is a knack for treading a nicely judged line between intellectual grandiloquence and comic self-deflation. Another is a poet’s lack of piety about the novel as a form. 10:04, in particular, is filled with assurances that writing fiction in the old style couldn’t be further from Lerner’s mind. Ben meets his future partner “in a dull class about great novels”; at a literary dinner he tries to ignore “the distinguished male author droning on in the distance.” And while Lerner’s narrators are intellectually and socially self-conscious, they aren’t self-conscious storytellers in quite the same way that a lifer in the novel-writing business would be. In contrast to his poetry, which openly takes its bearings from Charles Olson and John Ashbery, and in spite of a very loose affinity with prose writers like W.G. Sebald and Javier Marías, his novels persuasively create the illusion that they’re inventing their own forms as they go along.

Lerner loves paradox—his defense of poetry, The Hatred of Poetry (2016), derives the possible existence of good poems from a close reading of a terrible one by William McGonagall—and in his fiction his posture as a writer who is mysteriously compelled to produce pseudo-memoir for the marketplace acts as cover for a marked resemblance to a gifted novelist. Without assuming that the normative reader is a man, his avatars do the kinds of dumb things that young literary men traditionally do in novels. Although Lerner nearly always avoids rendering another character’s consciousness in a way that could be construed as appropriative, he’s good at letting other characters hold the stage and speak in their own voices. And his narrators’ ruminations tend to take place inside a sturdy story structure: learning that you’ve been a real poet all along, figuring out that the woman you consider your best friend might mean something more to you, diagnosing the nation’s ills by way of memories of your provincial adolescence.

An obvious objection to all of this, which French and Italian critics have been rehearsing ever since a vogue for autofiction swept their countries in the 1980s, is that it’s a bit self-absorbed and self-indulgent. Of course women’s politically constituted selves are worth unpacking, and of course writers ought to think about “subject positions” (i.e., sex, class, and ethnicity as they relate to power, which is what Adam means by “pornography and privilege”)—especially in a country where personal identity is constructed inside an exclusionary race system. But what does that have to do with writing novels filled with pages of undiluted art criticism, novels in which panel discussions and gallery visits and drinks receptions make up most of the action? If this kind of writing isn’t a byproduct of social media and hypercapitalist individualism, isn’t it just a narrow kind of academic art?

The first line of defense is simply that Lerner writes well. There’s a good description in Atocha of the way the words of an absorbing narrative “dissolve into a feeling and a speed,” and in spite of all the reveries and digressions, he knows how to write scenes that do that. He can be very funny, and his standards of decorum can be part of the joke. A comic set piece in 10:04 in which Ben has to make a sperm donation—feeling that an active choice from the DVD menu in the booth would say bad things about him, he just hits play and gets served Asian Anal Adventurers—is improved by Ben’s strained efforts to describe the situation, his shamefaced interactions with the attractive receptionist included, without implicating himself in the male gaze. Lerner’s stand-ins are allowed lifelike flashes of envy and aggression and foolishness. They can be touchy about matters of literary status while simultaneously feeling like impostors.

A deeper line of defense has to do with language as a social phenomenon. A crucial experience in Lerner’s poetry as well as his prose is understanding that your speech isn’t wholly your own. “You cannot withdraw and sing, at least not intelligibly./You can only sing in a corporate voice of corporate things,” he writes in “Auto-Tune,” a poem in The Lights (2023). The line uses “corporate” mainly in the sense of “collective, common” (the Oxford English Dictionary’s first attestation is from Shakespeare: “They answer in a joint and corporate voice”), although the poem plays elsewhere with the obsolete sense of “physical, corporeal.” In The Topeka School (2019), set in the mid-1990s, the young Adam Gordon is a high school debating champion. Pummeling his opponent with—in debating jargon—a “spread” of arguments and statistics on a subject he couldn’t care less about, he becomes a conduit for the nation’s political unconscious:

He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him, that the rhythm and intonation of his presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that he no longer had to organize his arguments so much as let them flow through him.

The Topeka School finds parallels for this dissociative experience everywhere: in the play of registers and voices in avant-garde poems; in the gabbled verbal fine print in commercials; in glossolalia and auditory hallucinations; and in Trump’s barrages of non sequiturs. But it’s also possible, Lerner suggests, to tune the corporate voice to more optimistic, Whitmanesque frequencies. The novel ends with the crowd at an ICE protest yelling a speaker’s words in unison, “a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.”

Lerner has expressed doubt about “the avant-garde fantasy that writing difficult poetry constitutes meaningful political action.” One of his poems worries that the culture-jamming ambitions he grew up with—the notion of disjunctive verbal devices as “malware…uploaded into language”—have worked better for MAGA than they have for poets. All the same, he’s drawn to writers who built bridges between their aesthetic interests and the politics of the left. Foremost among these is Walter Benjamin, whom Lerner seems to value above all for his Surrealist-influenced development of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Benjamin, in one commentator’s words, saw both language and the “phantasmagoria” of consumer goods as resembling “Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level.” Thomas shares a related thought in Transcription: “A problem with Freud is he thinks we dream only our own dreams.” Politics, he tells the somewhat baffled narrator, “is when we sit around the fire and make the dream social, no?”

A short, tightly organized chamber piece, Transcription is in some ways the most straight-up novel—or novella—that Lerner has written. There’s still some tapping on the fourth wall: asked for a reminder of his daughter’s name, the narrator says, “I call her Eva in this book.” His wife is once again an anthropologist he met in college, this time named Mia. But this narrator is set at a fractionally greater distance from Lerner than usual: he’s from Nebraska, not Kansas, and has one daughter, not two. As for Thomas, he’s a full-blown fictional character, and works as such whether or not the reader deduces that Lerner has probably blended aspects of his real-life mentors Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop—principally their house in Providence and connections to France—with the Frankfurt School–affiliated writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, another Lerner mentor with whom he once collaborated and whom he interviewed for TheParis Review.

The novel has an elegant three-part structure, with a short middle section that acts like a fulcrum. In the opening section the narrator, on arriving in Providence, breaks his phone. Anxious about being offline, but also enjoying a refreshed awareness of the world around him, he makes his way to Thomas’s house, where he’s too ashamed to admit that he doesn’t have a recording device. They get down to the magazine interview. Thomas is free-associative, allusive, hard to keep on track. The narrator unwisely mentions his dream on the train—he was trying to pick up Eva from a school in Paris while sirens went off in the distance—and Eva’s post-pandemic struggles with anxiety. Thomas sympathizes. His own granddaughter, he says, has been having some sort of minor difficulty with food. She is like Kafka’s hunger artist; it must be a consequence of too much screen time. But, he wonders, can the narrator be sure the dream was really his? It sounds like something that once happened to Thomas’s son, Max.

Thomas has long since started repeating himself. The narrator has noticed that he is more disheveled than he used to be. Earlier, slipping away to use the landline, he found a forgotten meal on the dining room table, the kitchen disorganized, a cold draft blowing from the sagging window by the sink.

They pick up the conversation. Thomas’s mood seems to darken. He speaks of Max’s mother, Virginie, who died by suicide in France many years ago, having stopped taking her lithium. Then Thomas swerves abruptly to the subject of lithium-ion batteries in smartphones. He speaks of “glass in my lungs,” meaning ground-glass opacities on a CT scan. The narrator later thinks involuntarily of the glass in the cables that keep the Internet running. From time to time it’s clear that Thomas is confusing him with Max (they are, in fact, college friends). For reasons having to do with Thomas asking Max to accompany him to Switzerland, father and son have been quarreling, it seems. Being from Omaha, the narrator doesn’t catch the implications of the old man’s ominous repeated references to going to Switzerland. Assuming that “Dignitas” signifies “a small museum in Zurich” rather than an assisted dying clinic, he slips away again to call Eva, bringing this section to an end.

The middle section, set some time later, establishes that Thomas died before the interview was published. (We don’t learn how he died; “of course I have been thinking about Switzerland,” someone says ambiguously at a memorial event.) Then we’re in Los Angeles for the third and final section, a long conversation with Max. More time has passed, and the narrator appears to have brought a working phone, because this section is a transcript. Max does nearly all the talking, and he has two stories to tell. The first concerns his daughter, Emmie, whose—it turns out—utterly terrifying eating disorder receded as inexplicably as it began when she started snacking in front of an iPad. The second concerns his attempt to make peace with his father during the pandemic, when Thomas was on a ventilator and Max, speaking from LA through a nurse’s phone, told him things he could utter only “as a disembodied voice.” As far as Max could tell afterward, Thomas didn’t hear a word of what he’d said.

Each of Max’s stories has great emotional force and seems to reverse, or at least qualify, the book’s loathing of screen technology. At the same time, an intricate system of callbacks—even the sagging kitchen window plays its part—turns Max’s last visit to Thomas’s house into a mirror image of the narrator’s. They speak the same words: each man feels at some point “as though someone had placed an ice pack against the back of my neck,” and mentions that his troubled daughter’s best friend “kind of left her.” The narrator’s dream, it emerges, bears a strange resemblance to an episode in Paris when a bombing made Thomas late to pick up Max from school. But there are significant differences too. The narrator is consistently reluctant to call Thomas, nervous about hearing “his disembodied voice,” while Max can speak to him honestly only on the phone. Each takes part in a long conversation in which one party is oblivious to what the other is trying to say, but the misunderstandings run in opposite directions.

And there is more going on in this short book: a subplot about the narrator’s resentment over an act of infidelity; an immensely complicated network of images growing out of an exhibition of glassware; a more positive idea of Switzerland; further play on voices corporate and incorporate, embodied and disembodied. Thomas functions as a conductor of poetic subtexts as well as an actor in the story, and none of it would work if Lerner had written him as a Yoda-speaking Mitteleuropean sage or a grave figure like the novelist in Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991). Instead he’s viewed with exasperation as well as love and puzzled respect. “No jokes, please,” he snaps when the narrator tactfully tries to smooth over an apparent lapse of memory by pulling an aw-shucks “We Nebraskans” routine. A reference to “A Hunger Artist” tips Max over the edge. “Dad, this isn’t art or literature, Emmie isn’t a character in a fiction, she’s my fucking daughter,” he finds himself yelling at this man who went to concerts with Theodor Adorno.

Another impressive quality of Transcription is its mixture of ingenuity and directness. There’s no messing around about being a fiction about phones and brain rot, the pandemic’s psychic aftershocks, fires and floods and fascism, and the bourgeois family unit as the place where economics and public discourse play out: “a tiny station in a grid,” as Thomas puts it. But it’s all so interwoven that it’s hard to say which theme is on top at any particular moment, and none of the storylines goes the way the reader might expect. The novel is open to the idea that this may be a slightly niche form of art. Max, a corporate lawyer, is painfully aware that he’s telling a story about “self-loathing elites, weeping over overpriced salads.” Even so, you feel that Lerner has earned it when he has the narrator repeat a line of Thomas’s on the subject of dream interpretation: “You call this fiction, but it is more.”