{"id":82228,"date":"2026-04-01T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=82228"},"modified":"2026-03-31T22:00:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T04:00:34","slug":"a-novel-as-slim-as-an-iphone-has-a-lot-to-say-about-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/a-novel-as-slim-as-an-iphone-has-a-lot-to-say-about-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"A novel as slim as an iPhone has a lot to say about technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Among a reporter\u2019s greatest fears, along with misspelling a name or being duped by a source, is that their recording apparatus will fail during an interview. And yet some of the best, like the longtime New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross, refused to use such contraptions at all, feeling they were no substitute for an alert human ear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ben Lerner\u2019s new novel, \u201cTranscription\u201d \u2014 slim as an early-model iPad, so slim it\u2019s technically a novella \u2014 palpates this ever-more-tender boundary between human and machine. As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it\u2019s about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cImpossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating when the small waves hit them,\u201d the unnamed narrator thinks, suspecting someone of eavesdropping on an old-fashioned phone conversation. \u201cYou call this fiction, but it is more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what is literature if not eavesdropping?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lerner, 47, is one of the more celebrated writers of a generation whose writers have mostly ceased to be celebrities \u2014 and, as if to make up for this cultural diminishment, tend to center \u2026 writers very much like themselves. (Some might say autofiction has run amok; others might shrug that self-representation, as in online profiles and avatars, is our moment\u2019s only shared truth.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His second novel, \u201c10:04,\u201d cited \u201cBack to the Future\u201d and had a plot punctuated with artificial insemination and flanked by hurricanes. His third, \u201cThe Topeka School,\u201d which returned to the alter-ego protagonist \u201cAdam Gordon\u201d of his debut, \u201cLeaving the Atocha Station,\u201d was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is a poet, and boy, does he know it, publishing an 86-page bound essay on the genre\u2019s discontents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And he is a son of Harriet Lerner, the psychologist and author of, most famously, \u201cThe Dance of Anger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reading \u201cTranscription,\u201d I kept thinking of Momma Lerner\u2019s discussion of how two people experiencing conflict in a relationship subconsciously pull in a third to deflect the tension, and realized the title here might just as well be \u201cTriangulation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is divided into three parts, each titled after a hotel: the first in Providence, R.I., where an unnamed narrator is on assignment for an unnamed magazine, to interview Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual whose earliest aural memory is hearing \u201cHitler\u2019s voice, rising and rising in pitch,\u201d on the radio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The night before their appointment the narrator drops his smartphone, containing the voice memo app along with so much else of his life, in the undrained hotel sink of his room, leaving it \u201ca small, wounded animal\u201d that he cannot bring back to life in time. He will be left to his own devices, as people used to say without arch air quotes: the cache of his own brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you start seeing triangles, it becomes hard to stop. Thomas has a son, Max, who was a year ahead of the narrator in college. (\u201cMaybe you were the real son,\u201d Max suggests later to his father\u2019s mentee, \u201cmaybe I was the clone or robot or doppelg\u00e4nger.\u201d) Max and the narrator are each married, with one daughter, like the characters in the old \u201cSchoolhouse Rock\u201d song \u201cThree Is a Magic Number\u201d; Thomas seems to represent past, present and future all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The short second section stops in Madrid, where Lerner and his fictional stand-ins have both traveled on scholarships. Thomas has died, and the narrator is castigated there after revealing in a lecture that his \u201clast interview ever\u201d with the old man, parts of which have already been quoted and reproduced elsewhere, were reconstructed from memory. \u201cA deepfake,\u201d a curator scolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third section moves to Los Angeles, and back in time, through reminiscence, with Max describing how his child was afflicted with what doctors called avoidant\/restrictive food intake disorder. \u201c\u2018My daughter won\u2019t eat\u2019 becomes ARFID,\u201d he notes. \u201cThe acronym is like a code, moves the alpha toward the numerical; numbers are objective, right, suddenly it\u2019s science!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas was a screen skeptic, comparing the girl to \u201cThe Hunger Artist\u201d or pre-Christian ascetics. Yet watching unboxing videos \u2014 consumption!\u2014 soothes her into being able to nourish herself again. (ARFID turns out to be no match for A.S.M.R.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And when Thomas is hospitalized, it is a screen, and a kind nurse brokering FaceTime, that empowers Max to impart the meaningful final messages that, in actual face-to-face time, he is unable to deliver. In person, he felt erased, a ghost; relating this, \u201cTranscription\u201d becomes a familiar story about the dynamic between an accomplished but distant father and the son who cannot quite reach him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete\u2019s command of different, overlapping genres, is winning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet \u201cTranscription\u201d is more of an exercise than a sporting event, like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball, the \u2014 yep! \u2014 triangle with its oracular messages bobbing within.<\/p>\n\n\n\n