Autofiction has been known for fictionalising the mundane real lives of its creators. The names of the narrators aren’t always identical to those on the book covers, but their circumstances usually coincide with known details of the authors’ lives: their ages, children, hometowns, careers, and sometimes their publications and awards (a feature of contemporary literary celebrity). This starting point of self-reference has suggested, to many critics and readers, a kind of solipsism, or enclosure of imagination within the bounds of ego.
It has not reflected the best of these novels in practice. The early 2010s were key years for the Anglo-American variant of the form, with landmarks including Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be (2010), Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (also 2014). Each novel evinced a surprisingly loose self-possession. Other characters intruded upon the narrators’ consciousness and occasionally hijacked each book in extended dialogues. Heti’s narrator, a writer also named Sheila, was most open to these forms of spirit possession, since her premise was a wish to emulate her friends as a means of becoming herself. She carries around a tape recorder to capture their speech exactly, and large sections of the book become transcripts. Outline was most savage, a masterpiece of banked rage. Cusk’s narrator emerged in outline between the shapes of the men who waste her time, telling self-serving life stories and never asking her own.
Lerner’s inset dialogues obtruded most because they had least to do with the novel’s plot. 10:04 was essentially the self-satire of a social class, having some gentle fun with a stratum of well-meaning and well-insulated young artists in New York City, among whom the Brooklyn-based poet-turned-novelist has become an exemplary, self-satirising figure. In the midst of their most secure bourgeois redoubts, monologuing walk-on characters introduced chaos. A protester, coming for dinner and a hot shower to the narrator’s apartment, extemporises on how Occupy Wall Street has freed him from masculine struggle: “I don’t act like my cock weighs a ton.” In the Park Slope Co-op, a volunteer tells her life story as a woman of colour who discovers her birth father was, in fact, a white man: “It was like I could see my skin whitening a little, felt colour draining from my body.” Each monologue has the apparent randomness of an asteroid-strike of passion, grief, or disorder, blazing momentarily without any apparent consequence for the plot, and putting readers to the task of interpretation.
Lerner expands this dimension of his earlier method in the brilliant new novella Transcription. The purpose is no longer satirical, but elegiac. Unfolding within a story about artists, these eerie and fragmentary bursts of monologue create a set of mysteries about transmission between generations, and about the messiness of families. At the story’s centre is Thomas, a retired professor in Providence, Rhode Island, filmmaker, playwright, theorist and apparently “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology”. Aged 90, he waits to die, casually announcing his scheduled trip to Switzerland for assisted suicide. The unnamed narrator, his illustrious disciple, has arrived on the Amtrak train to record an interview for “the magazine”, seemingly the Paris Review, for which Lerner himself interviewed both the German writer Alexander Kluge and his mentor, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, apparently mixed together in parts of this fictionalisation.
Thomas’s memory is fluid and tricksterish. The narrator fumblingly relates a dream he had while napping on the train, and Thomas reshapes it into a message from his dead wife, a suicide half a century ago. He confounds the narrator with his son Max, until even the narrator seems confused about who he is. When Thomas flies into a rage at his guest for forgetting, or denying, a trip they all made to the Franco-Swiss village La Cure, it isn’t clear which of his real or symbolic offspring he is truly objecting to, or what in this minor visit could have been so unforgettable.
Three conversations occur in the book, forming its three chapters, each one a dialogue verging on a monologue. Each rises, too, to an unexpected explosion of anger. Having broken his iPhone and failed to confess it during the interview, the narrator has no record of his first interview with Thomas. When, at a memorial at a Spanish museum, he owns up to reconstructing from memory the first part of Thomas’s final testament, he is castigated by the curator, Rosa, a fellow disciple, for slipping himself into this precious transcription of the great man’s verbal legacy. At the end of the third chapter-dialogue – this one, the best – Thomas’s son Max recounts an episode in which he secretly recorded his prophetic but also distant and alienating father to prove to others how icy and intolerable he really was: “Trust me, no matter how great it was to have him as a mentor, you don’t want a spirit medium as a father.” This time, it is the son who flies into a rage at his father for forgetting the trip they had all taken to La Cure – “the trip”, he tells the narrator, “where I introduced you both to Rosa, with all that would entail”. In Rosa, Max and the narrator, we have a scaffolding of three progeny of the technological-magician father, Thomas; three retellings that turn from love to rage; and something important but unnamed that did, or didn’t, happen in La Cure.
The chapters all end with a suspicion that Thomas may be coordinating all their responses and communications, and the book itself, in occult fashion: “Conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds… You call this fiction, but it is more.” What more could it be? Art, evidently. The book orbits the narrator’s recollection of the well-known permanent exhibition of glass flowers at Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, forged by glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a father and son, beginning in the 1880s. It seems an unpromising or banal metaphor for the illusions of artifice in freezing reality, unless it is the genealogy that really matters, in a meditation on the gifts and curses handed down by an uncanny father, recomposing the stories and confessions they write: “Maybe [Thomas] would be holding the papers in his hand when I entered my room, his green eyes capable of seeing in the dark.”
Transcription is unusual, even in “literary fiction”, as a work made self-consciously of gaps and loose ends. About many central matters, it simply won’t tell us. Most books shape mysteries in order to solve them; this refuses. The absence of information presses even into our access to the most basic intimate life of our narrator. We learn of the college origins and near-permanent rupture of the narrator’s relationship with his wife, Mia, who during a study trip to Spain fell in love with an older man, Andrés, and forsook the narrator. Throughout the narrator’s subsequent emotional collapse, Mia’s roommate tells him the details of the love affair – Andrés has moved to New York; he is working in construction with Mia’s father; he has now managed to bring his dog from Spain. Only later does the narrator run into Mia, repeating everything he has learned. None of it was true, lies told, perhaps, to seduce the narrator – but we never learn the roommate’s motives, how the narrator and Mia assimilated this breach, or why they are in couples’ therapy now, years later. It seems the shape of reality, and the most consequential futures (their family, their daughter), depend upon transcriptions of stories in one direction or another, changing as they go.
At college, the narrator heard voices, and we learn in passing that his college best friend, Arjun, did too, ending up as one of the book’s multiple suicides when “he fell from the window in St Petersburg”. No further explanation frames the death. Nothing quite explains how the narrator survived and his friend died, except that Thomas taught the narrator to accept the voices as his mind’s projection of words and messages that were always latent in the undifferentiated spectra of sound.
This novella is not so much plotted as woven. Motifs recur, doubling, tripling, in variations. Lerner’s speakers all have a fluency in their prose that is reassuringly constant, a flowing articulacy and dramatic rhythm that is on display here to greatest effect in Max’s 50-page near-monologue, a tour de force. Though a lawyer, not an artist or scholar like the others, the son is given the voice of greatest momentum, in the anxiety and resentment of a lifetime of neglect, as he returns to his father’s house:
Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger. I felt eight and 18 and 45 all at once, my grasp on reality was tentative, an extreme form of the effect his presence always had on me, a nightmarish form of what others so loved about him – how he seemed from the future and the past simultaneously, a gentleman time traveller, how he re-enchanted the air around us, made other worlds seem possible, as you might say… And then it was time to sit and have wine, although he wasn’t drinking, in the living room, which was always dim, which somehow always seemed in the process of getting dimmer, as though the houselights of a theatre were being lowered forever without the room ever going dark.
Max’s monologue is not initially about his father, Thomas, at all, but about his daughter. Emmie, his adorable and brilliant only child, gently parented, carefully adored, has stopped eating except for the barest minimum needed for survival. Lerner unfolds a case study of the recently named and diagnosed “Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder” – in fact the subject of a long cover story in New York magazine last July, evidently a malady of our time – as something entirely unlike a medical mystery, and more like an existential nightmare of love and parental care. It is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist” (to which Thomas alludes) translated to the most articulate and moving form of domestic realism, in the agony of Max and his wife Adelle and the child who, finally convinced by her father’s begging insistence to drink a smoothie, “carefully set the empty glass down on the table, and vomited a long arc of smoothie all over herself, the table, the floor”.
The solution to Emmie’s illness, her inability to consume substance, winds up being an abandonment of restrictions on “screen time” and unrestricted absorption of the virtual world of her iPad. “She was watching these ‘unboxing’ videos on YouTube, but she ate. Watching unboxing videos, Emmie ate like never before.” There seems to be some bind between the consumption of physical products portrayed in the weightless form of social media, the way these goods are represented in the ether, and the child’s renewal of contact with the material world, our daily bread.
Transcription’s packaging and marketing have emphasised the book’s technological interests more than any other. It’s true that the initial source of charm and suspense in the book is the hapless narrator’s accidental drowning of his iPhone while brushing his teeth, leaving him to wonder how to interview his mentor without possession of a functioning voice recorder. This conceit of the destroyed screen is artfully memorialised on the book’s cover as a sand or limestone-encrusted iPhone, seemingly an artefact excavated in a distant future that can wonder about our era of technology. But Lerner’s novella has no particular brief for or against our screens and mobile phones, nor all the historical extensions of the senses running from the Nazi radio broadcasts which appear in Thomas’s first memories to the game of Fruit Ninja the narrator’s daughter plays on her iPad. The book is quite elegant in anatomising the feelings, in the hand and head and eyesight, of alternating presences and absences of the newer technologies to which we’ve grown accustomed. Even deprived of access, the narrator feels, “my hand reached for the corpse of my phone”; minutes later, he is “experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline”.
Beneath all its many technologies, however, the novella presents in the end a puzzling image: those famous glass flowers, “thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom”, and “models of fruit in perpetual decay”. They neither make the world possible nor end it. Their artifice allows a conscious alternation between world and representation, in “the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next”. And if the glass models are “recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity”, made to replicate and transcribe natural life, we learn they are only possible because of a succession of generations who pass on a vital development within these artificial forms. The craft comes neither from replicable science nor individual virtuosity, but from a mysterious skill transmitted through generations of fathers and sons; so we learn in an epigraph of Leopold Blaschka’s that unusually postfaces the book:
“We have the touch. My son… has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation. The only way to become a glass-modeller of skill… is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass… But, if you do not have such ancestors, it is not your fault.”
Transcription
Ben Lerner
Granta, 144pp, £14.99
[Further reading: Patrick Radden Keefe’s obituary for Britain]
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This article appears in the 22 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, All alone
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