By Kevin Lozano, an editor and writer from Queens
Photo: Martin Schoeller for New York Magazine
Photo: Martin Schoeller for New York Magazine
In 2024, Ben Lerner was asked if he wanted to interview one of his mentors, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, for The Paris Review. “I was really ambivalent about it,” Lerner told me. “Rosmarie is amazing. She’s a hero of mine. But she’s not very easy to interview, in part because one of her remarkable characteristics is she doesn’t just bullshit.”
That conversation was an origin point for his new book, Transcription, which can be loosely described as about an interview gone wrong. “I was thinking about the degree to which the voice of an author is really fiction, because there’s all this editing and moving stuff around, and so you end up with a document that bears little relation to the actual conversation,” Lerner said. “There’s only an oblique relation.”
We were eating lunch at Il Buco, a decades-old bistro in Noho, on a frigid February afternoon. He arrived looking more debonair than I expected, in an all-black ensemble — sunglasses, jeans, wool coat, and cable-knit sweater. He hardly betrayed any hint that last year he had major heart surgery. In fact, he seemed at ease: The server recognized him immediately (he’s been meeting Harper’s editors there for years), and Lerner ordered, for the both of us, a glass of “something dry and cold.” For lunch, he requested the chicken: a roasted baby chicken from a farm upstate, to be exact, an order that, in its comically artisanal specificity, recalls the opening scene of his 2014 novel, 10:04, which involves the eating of an “impossibly tender” baby octopus that has been “literally massaged to death.”
At just under 130 pages, Transcription is not really a novel but something else — its editor, Mitzi Angel, calls it a “séance.” It’s a hybrid book that fuses the disparate interests of Lerner’s poetry, fiction, and essays into a haunting story about fatherhood and middle age. Divided into three parts, it concerns an unnamed narrator who has been asked by a magazine to interview his mentor, a 90-year-old German artist-intellectual named Thomas who survived a near-fatal case of COVID, in his home in Providence. But before the interview, the narrator drops his phone in water. Unable to explain to Thomas he has no way to record their conversation, the narrator pretends his broken phone is working — and the interview commences.
The conversation that unfolds is some of Lerner’s most brilliant and daring writing to date, a mad, oracular burst of speech — about technology, parenthood, and dreaming — that flits effortlessly between prose and poetry. At its center is Thomas’s hope for absolution, his sense that fatherhood’s eternal tendency is toward failure: “To forgive each other we must acknowledge that these forces are too great. That die Familie, it is a tiny station in a grid. Economic and electric. Or a dish, receiving from space. The love, it must go on forever in both ways.” (Thomas’s gnomic style is partly inspired by Lerner’s friend and collaborator Alexander Kluge, the recently deceased writer and filmmaker, whom he also interviewed for The Paris Review.)
In the second section, the narrator reveals, at a posthumous celebration of Thomas’s work in Spain, that the “exit interview” he did for the magazine was largely “reconstructed” from memory. His decision to publish the fabulated interview, which apparently angers Thomas’s friends and family, will haunt the rest of the book, which, in its third section, gives way to a visit between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max, who reflects on his difficult relationship with his artist father and his own parenting failures caring for a daughter with an eating disorder.
Transcription might seem like an unusual follow-up to Lerner’s last novel, 2019’s The Topeka School, a Pulitzer finalist. That book oscillated among the points of view of Ben Lerner’s fictional avatar, Adam Gordon, a gifted high-school debater; his psychologist parents, Jane and Jonathan; and a troubled young man named Darren. It was also his most conventional book after two works of comic, cerebral fiction — his 2011 debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and 10:04 — that were more concerned with the foibles of a Lerner-like character, a poet, later a novelist (or, as Lerner describes himself, an “accidental” novelist), who fears he is nothing more than a fool and a bad artist.
These novels were lumped into a genre called autofiction, a blanket term for the diffuse, often plotless autobiographical fiction of the 2010s — Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are other noted practitioners — and The Topeka School was hailed as a sort of mainstream breakthrough: In its attempt to understand (or “decode,” as some said) how white male rage in America transformed from an inchoate force into a political movement, the book was more of a classic social novel than other autofiction, which is a genre often critiqued for its self-obsession.
To a degree, Lerner is explicitly rejecting expectations with Transcription. “I worried that The Topeka School might have explained too much,” Lerner told me, “and I wanted to write a book that could let in all the things I’m interested in but around the edges or in felt silences.”
He is now, at 47, among the most prominent writers in America, a man trusted to steward two dying arts, the novel and the poem, even though he rejects the notion of the Great American Novel. “The discourse of the novel is singularly haunted by discourses of universality. There’s this idea that someone at some point will write the novel that somehow crystallizes the American moment. And, in fact, there isn’t one book that’s going to do that. And there isn’t one writer who can stand for all writing or can stand for a generation,” he said. “Wherever I am now, I am not a young novelist. Heart surgery will do that to you, in addition to everything else.” That’s not such a bad thing, according to Lerner. “A sign of maturity as a writer, I realize now,” he told me, “is that I no longer pretend I understand what exactly my work is saying or doing.” He does know one thing for certain: “It’s not a fucking beach read.”
The next time I met Lerner was at his home in Kensington in March, a few days after a storm covered the city in more than a foot of snow. He answered the door in Crocs. (The shoes were a gift from his daughters.) Trailing after him was Pixie, the terrier mix his family adopted during COVID. They had just made it back from Puerto Rico; his wife, Ariana Mangual Figueroa, an ethnographer, has family there. They met when they were freshmen at Brown. They moved to Brooklyn in 2010 and now both teach in New York’s public-college system, Mangual Figueroa at the CUNY Graduate Center and Lerner at Brooklyn College.
His daughters, Lucía, 13, and Marcela, 10, came to greet me and to look over the doughnuts I had brought. “When my girls asked, ‘What’s your new weird book about?,’ I told them it was about this guy who drops his phone in the sink. They were like, ‘Oh my gosh. Tell me more,’ ” said Lerner. Lucía told me she didn’t remember having that reaction. When I asked if she still thought the idea was interesting, she shrugged. His kids love to troll him. They’ve never made him do a TikTok dance because, according to Lucía, “he doesn’t move like that.” Marcela claimed he once wore sweatpants to a ballet at Lincoln Center and she was very embarrassed. Lerner strenuously denied her recollection, calling it a “scandalous lie.”
While his daughters sorted through the doughnuts, I could see, in real time, a tension he’s working through. He’s a world-class talker; his eloquence is commanding when it’s brought to bear on his art. But he’s dumbstruck by his children, unsure of how he wants them to fit into the world of his books. “Parenting and writing are the two biggest things in my life,” he’d told me when I saw him for lunch. “You don’t necessarily make good art when you’re trying to be a good parent, because if you’re imagining your kids as possible readers, you might censor yourself so intensely. It becomes something different — when you have to protect your voice from the responsibilities of parenting and when you have to protect your kids from the energies of the art.”
It was easier to train his unsparing eye on himself and his own failures: Lerner’s protagonists are basically Ben Lerner in clown makeup. In Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator is an arrogant, pill-popping poet on a fellowship in Madrid, convinced of his own mediocrity and lying to just about everybody he meets. In 10:04, he is an adult in Brooklyn, more charming but still faintly ridiculous, facing some serious life changes — family planning, a major book deal, and a diagnosis that could suddenly kill him. The Topeka School functions as a prologue: The narrator is a man-boy on the cusp of college, full of hormones and anger. (Lerner thinks the narrator in Transcription can be seen as “Adam Gordon, or it can be me … some unstable mixture of the two.”)
That the engine for his fiction is his own personal life has presented some problems. He knows there’s something “fundamentally annoying” about his books; they “inhabit privileged positions.” Indeed, his protagonists are easy to mock: What are we to make of overweening straight-A types complaining about their lot in life? Seen from a certain angle, they are a self-critical indictment of Lerner’s social class; from another, all the neurotic fretting, one critic complained, can resemble a “humble brag” — that Lerner is mildly embarrassed by his wild success.
Lerner is clearly sensitive about how he’s received. “People who say they’re not thinking about reception at all tend to be liars,” he said. “It’s this great, generous thing where you feel like people are paying attention to what you do. But this fixation on reception, such as it is, distracts from the possibility of somebody actually attending to the artwork. And some of the things I’m writing make that worse or more complicated because they are themselves about the relationship between life and fiction and being a writer and all that shit.”
He felt especially uncomfortable with the reception of The Topeka School, which generated “all this stuff I had to manage or disavow.” He explained, “Suddenly it became, ‘Is this what you’re saying? Is this a prehistory of all of Trumpism?’ ”
That’s a lot to place on the shoulders of a man who is worried, like many Brooklyn dads, about lunch and screen time. Seated around the dining-room table, grazing at the half-empty box of doughnuts, his daughters and I talked mostly about phones: how we texted before touchscreens, the disappearance of phone cards, long-distance calls and landlines, their abuela’s flip phone, and how, in Puerto Rico, Lucía played with the island’s ancient pay phones, struck by how out of place and anachronistic they were.
Transcription is clearly invested in finding a new way to talk about cell phones and second screens. “The book is not in the position that everything is stupid, everything is flattened, everything is done,” Lerner said. “I think of it as trying to make contact with mystery from within the media environment.” He’s not an optimist, by any measure; the experience of parenting makes it hard to see smartphones as anything but a necessary evil. “I’m always looking at my phone while telling my daughter to not look at hers. I feel the degradation of my own attention,” he said. “But I’m not superior and offline. I speak from a position of feeling totally fucking compromised. I’m fighting for my intellectual life.”
He added, “My favorite writers who write about technological change are never just about celebration or condemnation. I mean, Proust is the Ur-example. The phone call with his grandmother — it’s media history and it’s class history, but it’s also the history of a milieu, and it’s an intensely lived art theory.”
In his own way, Lerner achieves something similar with the smartphone; he transfigures it into a potent symbol of change, but he does so by making it a more visceral, even novel technology. When the narrator breaks his phone, its absence interrupts multiple orders of his life and being: “I was experiencing withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange … by my being suddenly offline.” It sounds awfully dramatic, but Lerner has found a way to make phonelessness vivid, almost fleshy in its legibility (“I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level”). He also questions how deeply the idea of the internet — the sheer prevalence of screens and the fact of constant interconnection — has burrowed into our souls.
Most of the novel’s second half centers on Emmie, Thomas’s granddaughter, who has developed a severe eating disorder — ARFID — that implicates her family and their bourgeois comfort. Max, her father, asks, “Is it because the life on offer is a lie? Is it because she knows that privilege involves the immiseration of others? Is it because she is registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe?” The solution, her horrified parents realize, is letting Emmie bring the iPad to the dinner table, because “the device takes [her] out of the real world, shields [her] from all the pressures and information.” But what she’s watching while she eats are ASMR unboxing videos. In this moment of utterly confused parenting, an admixture of dread and bleak humor, the best of Transcription comes to the surface. There’s a plainspoken immediacy to the terror of one’s child not eating, and its rendering here is emotionally powerful. By its end, the novel is unexpectedly moving.
Lerner’s friend, the poet and scholar Jeff Dolven, points out that, in Transcription, he has managed to turn “the great spoiler of the avant-garde, the family,” into an avenue for experimentation: “He’s done this very strange thing, which is to make his absolute embeddedness in, and commitment to, and fear for, and love of his family into art.”
It’s been seven months since Lerner’s surgery — the one that replaced a diseased portion of his aortic root with an artificial graft. In his garage turned office, Lerner showed me a pile of books he recently read, all of them about the heart, across different genres (a novel, a history, and a personal essay on heart transplants by the French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy). He couldn’t stand to look at any of this before the surgery, but with some hindsight, he feels lucky that doctors operated on him last year; the valve-sparing aortic-root replacement took decades to perfect. It requires the cooling of the heart and clamping of the aorta, literally arresting the flow of blood and redirecting it into a cardiopulmonary-bypass machine, all so the root of a major artery can be incised and replaced with a piece of tubing. I don’t recommend watching videos of the procedure if you are squeamish, but its material history is odd, even Lerner-esque: Dacron, the synthetic fiber used to replace his aortic root, is often found in upholstered furniture, and its medical use was discovered by accident.
The surgery happened after he had completed most of Transcription, but his new book might be overwhelmed by an old one; everyone keeps asking him about 10:04. Running through 10:04 is the “awareness that there was a statistically significant chance the largest artery in [the narrator’s] body would rupture at any moment.” Fifteen years ago, doctors found that Lerner’s had the same defect, but he was told time and again that for now he was fine. That was, until higher-resolution imaging revealed he wasn’t. “What happened is that they discovered that, all this time, I had been beyond the surgical threshold,” he said. He wondered, “Why do I have to do anything if it’s been stable all this time?”
“Apparently, I was just lucky,” Lerner said. “And so people who knew 10:04, when I told them that I had the surgery, they thought I knew this would eventually happen — that this was coming — and I had to say, ‘No, no, actually, in the real world, I was told this wasn’t something to worry about yet.’ It was a really shocking narrative reorganization, because nothing’s changed, but the mismeasurement changed everything.” When the cardiologist called, Lerner thought he “was being punished for having mixed fact and fiction around.”
Lerner often talks about literature’s reality-bending power, at times mockingly: He never got quite as much money as the 10:04 narrator, who claims to have received an advance “in the strong six figures,” but he wrote it down hoping he might. “Writing fiction that’s heavily involved in your biography seems like the least magical thing fiction can do,” he said. “You’re working with the materials at hand, and on the other hand, it’s like the most ancient, riskiest feeling, the blurring of the boundary between what language might instantiate and what’s already real, that incantatory power of fiction.”
In an essay about the surgery in The New York Review of Books last year, Lerner wrote, “My only defense against reality: to transform it into literature.” You feel that sentiment in Transcription, a novel that attempts to reimagine the most alienating of our shared afflictions — the human body in disarray, the relatively new societal anxiety of phone addiction — into a more humane aesthetic experience.
“As is often the case with writers who lean toward the theoretical, not enough people seem to realize how tender Ben is,” says the poet and novelist Ocean Vuong, who studied with Lerner at Brooklyn College. Nor, Vuong says, do they fully acknowledge that his work, for a long time, has tangled with “the failure and the futility, at times, of language to articulate love.” Transcription pursues this impossible ideal. Lerner wishes some readers would realize he’s an earnest guy: “I would love to read a review of the book that says it is just sentimental bullshit,” he said. “I am on the side of feeling!”
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