CW: Disordered eating.
As an Oxford student, I often think it would be nice to have fewer screens in my life. No more phone, no more tablet – I’d rid myself of these pointless objects and live life to the fullest, rapturously taking in every note of birdsong, every tree, every tiny vein on every leaf of every tree. I’d be fully engaged with the world instead of aimlessly googling whatever happens to come to my mind at any moment of the day. Most importantly, I might even finish my degree. I’d become a productivity machine.
On the other hand, maybe it would be a kind of living hell. This is a possibility that Ben Lerner’s short new book, Transcription (2026), raises. The book opens with the unnamed narrator travelling to interview his academic mentor and 90-year-old intellectual superstar, Thomas, for a magazine. In the hotel he’s staying in, just before he’s due to meet Thomas, he knocks his phone into the sink. Cue lots of panicking about how he’s not going to be able to record the interview – FOMO of the very worst kind. And yet he’s too embarrassed to simply say, “I knocked my phone into the sink and so I can’t record you”, and instead thinks up a semi-elaborate lie as to why their first meeting should merely be a preparation for the real interview. Not only that, though, the narrator’s lack of a phone makes him less attentive, not more. “Shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me”, as he puts it. “Paintings, analogue photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor’s house.” He has the opportunity to engage with all these things, but all he wants to do is check his emails. A bit like me when I’m ‘working’.
Lerner, who is somewhat of a literary superstar, at least in the US, is not afraid to take on the big themes. In Transcription, we find not only the question of “technologies of capture”, in the narrator’s words, but also, in no necessary order of importance: paternal abandonment, dementia, anorexia, suicide, Covid, the generation gap and euthanasia, often all mixed into the same page. It’s a lot to take on, and it’s not always entirely clear what each of these elements is doing, other than to add a certain seriousness to proceedings. And yet there’s something hypnotic about Lerner’s trim and often surprisingly hilarious prose, which keeps you reading on.
And the question the book raises is an interesting one, even if everybody has been asking it for a long time now. Are our screens good for us – an infinite source of knowledge which I’d once have had to traipse to the Radcam and read actual books to get – or are they gradually destroying our souls and our ability to connect with the world and even with each other? One of the strengths of Transcription is that it doesn’t give a definitive answer to this. It’s not a coincidence that Thomas’s anorexic granddaughter only finally starts to eat food once she has the distracting, soothing effect of as much screen time as she could possibly want. “Dad, I want you to cut me an apple”, she says one day as she is watching endless ASMR unboxing videos on YouTube. For her and also for her highly privileged parents, screen time is the greatest of blessings, far more so than books, a university education, and all the organic berries and grassfed beef their money brings them.
In complicating rather than answering the question, the book is very much a work of fiction, and indeed, fiction is another of Lerner’s themes. People experience different technologies in different ways, some good, some bad, some in between, but one idea the book raises is that there’s a parallel between our screen-dominated lives and fiction. When the narrator is accused of falsifying what becomes his famous interview with Thomas, the charge against him is that of turning the interview into fiction, as a “defence against the reality of losing” his mentor. Fiction as escape, fiction as a kind of reconstructed, mediated reality. Thought of in this way, it’s not clear how much difference there is between fiction and our permanently online world – or whether the one can really be that much worse than the other.
Not unrelatedly, the book also suggests that maybe there isn’t that much difference between a life which is mediated by screens and one which isn’t. Screens have constructed an alternate reality, one in which we quite literally live online, in the same digital house as millions of others, relating to each other in seemingly peculiar ways, hating them, loving them, completely misunderstanding them. But even when the people in Lerner’s book aren’t connected to one another via their phones or tablets, their world is a messy, incomprehensible place. People talk past each other, people forget who it is they’re talking to, people constantly worry about how others are perceiving them. In other words, the ‘real’ world isn’t any more appealing than the online world, precisely because it isn’t all that different. Where exactly this leaves us on the screen question is difficult to know. And what it means for my degree, I’ve got no idea. But I think that I’ll stick to my devices for now.
