In the opening scene of Ben Lerner’s first novel Leaving the Atocha Station, narrator Adam Gordon, an American poet on fellowship in Madrid, witnesses a stranger’s odd emotional display in the 15th-16th century Flemish painting rooms at the Prado Museum. As Adam looks on, the man begins sobbing suddenly at the feet of Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, before moving on to “totally [lose] his shit” in front of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Is this stranger grappling with some private trauma? Or could it be, Adam contemplates skeptically, that he is “having a profound experience of art?”
When I visited Madrid for the first time a couple months ago, I, too, found myself in room 56 at the Prado, standing in a crowd of tourists in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights, just a few minutes before the museum closed. As I stood in the gallery, acutely aware of the dwindling time, I was reminded suddenly of Lerner’s sobbing museum-goer, and briefly imagined Adam Gordon watching me from some kind of fictional vantage point, some sort of extra-temporal perspective. I was not quite losing my shit, but I realized that I was, perhaps, in some ways experiencing the profundity of art—I had been surprised to learn that Bosch’s masterful triptych was designed to open and close (almost, I thought, like a book), and that each of the work’s two outer panels depict one half of the globe, full of plants but devoid of animals and people. As I took it all in, shuffling around slightly to see the piece from a variety of angles, waiting patiently for the heads in front of me to clear the view, I thought about the ways in which learning about the triptych’s two additional panels changed my conception of the entire piece, adding a third dimension to what I had assumed to be a two-dimensional work. Making my way towards the exit at the behest of polite but firm gallery attendants, I was struck by the way that writing and painting had collaborated to bend time and space, bringing Bosch, Adam Gordon, and me somehow together for a transient moment.
Though my recent trip to the Prado certainly has something to do with it, it is perhaps due to the way that Ben Lerner’s work repeatedly engages these slippery questions—of art and metanarrative, reality, and autofictionality—that I am superimposing traces of Lerner’s first novel onto his latest release, the formally inventive and genre-dissolving novel Transcription. The strongest of Lerner’s fiction to date, Transcription itself is a kind of triptych—told through a series of conversations broken up over three sections, the novel fundamentally explores the expansive possibilities of art in our increasingly hyperconnected world. As Bosch employed oil on oak, Lerner is an artist whose medium is language; challenging our notions of what books are capable of, Transcription forms its argument as it enacts it, ultimately demonstrating fiction’s importance as a site of virtual experience, where meaning is made on both individual and collective levels.
Transcription’s three parts, Hotel Providence, [Hotel Villa Real], and Hotel Arbez, come together into a kind of recursive story about fatherhood, documentation, and dreams. The novel’s first section is set sometime during the Covid pandemic, and follows an unnamed, successful writer as he interviews his 90-year-old-mentor, Thomas, a renowned scholar and pioneer of literature and the arts. Tasked with conducting the interview for a famous magazine, the narrator travels to Rhode Island, where he accidentally drops his phone into the sink in his hotel bathroom—without his phone, the narrator has no means to record Thomas’s interview or to contact his wife and young daughter, who are back home facing the harsh reality of life in lockdown. The narrator nonetheless moves forward with his meeting, pretending that his broken phone is recording the conversation as Thomas speaks.
What follows is a dialogue that blends fiction, philosophy and poetry; weaving together threads from his characters’ pasts, presents, and futures, Lerner unites these narratives into a fragmented but beautifully coherent whole. Here, the novel’s title proves to be instructive—by naming it Transcription (as opposed to, say, “Transcript”), Lerner characterizes his work as a kind of reconstructive process rather than a definitive final product, highlighting both the fundamental instability of narrative and the possibility for connection that art provides.
With its short length and rapid pace, Transcription is a novel that centers language—after only a few pages of reading, I had to consciously put my pen out of reach, having underlined and starred so many passages that I could hardly keep track of my favorite lines. Lerner’s deceivingly straightforward prose is both accessible and vividly attuned to sensory detail, and his sharp ear for spoken language shines across the novel. Considering the novel is composed largely of conversations, the fact that the story’s three central voices (the narrator, Thomas, and Thomas’s son Max) are so uniquely discernable is a considerable achievement, despite Lerner’s choice to largely forgo dialogue tags.
Lerner’s poetic talent is on full display throughout Transcription, finding an especially successful foothold in Thomas. When first arriving at his mentor’s house for the interview, our narrator notes that “for Thomas, to listen to a story was to be involved in its composition.” Readers will quickly find that Thomas’s additive, idiosyncratic, and indeterminately-lucid communication style propels much of the novel’s thematic work—offering densely-loaded bits that resonate across the novel’s second and third sections, he says cryptic things like “Vibrations from the past or future may also be received, perhaps also through the teeth”, or “Like the eyes, all dreams are brown until they are shared.” Through Thomas, Lerner moves associatively, capturing fruitful abstract and poetic associations that could not otherwise be rendered in everyday speech. In one particularly potent memory, the narrator recounts an earlier period of distress in which he began hearing voices and is reassured by Thomas’s response. “Hallucination, too, is social,” the narrator recalls Thomas telling him—it is not illness the narrator is experiencing, but ghosts of sound, converging through time in a “superposition of voices.”
While the material of Transcription certainly offers a symbolic and thematic goldmine for those interested in big, existential questions, it is ultimately Lerner’s use of form that sets his work apart. Though written in first person, Lerner lets his narrator fade into the background at key moments, effectively handing the narration over to Thomas and Max during long passages of uninterrupted diegetic monologue. Somewhat akin to poetry’s lyric “I,” a kind of Greek chorus in which subjective, individual voices form a collective refrain, Lerner’s use of spoken language expands access to first-person narration, allowing multiple characters a turn to inhabit the “I” which drives this story forward.
Perhaps this is ultimately what Lerner’s novel hopes to convey—that, despite the hyper-individualistic, isolated world we find ourselves in, none of us exist in subjective solitude. And though the laws of physics (at least in our reality) dictate that we must exist in a single state of being, living each day at a time, stories are capable of offering connection beyond these bounds.
After all, as Thomas says, “this is the third option that becomes possible in art.”
FICTION
Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published April 7, 2026
Great review!