Ben Lerner’s new book, a novella in three sections, begins in early 2024 with a middle-aged writer, a graduate of Brown University, returning to Providence, Rhode Island, to interview his mentor, a ninety-year-old German cultural titan named Thomas. The unnamed narrator’s main concern is that ‘somehow’ the recording will fail – then, after talking to his ten-year-old daughter in his hotel bathroom, he ‘somehow’ knocks his iPhone into the sink. This development brings an obvious practical challenge, but also a welcome sensory advantage. Walking to Thomas’s house from his hotel, the narrator finds that ‘being suddenly offline’ renders the landscape ‘strange, the stones stonier’. His wording closely paraphrases Viktor Shklovsky’s theory that literary language defamiliarises reality – this is the basis for Lerner’s approach and the source of the book’s enticing, unpredictable oddness.

As things turn out, Transcription aspires to a compound estrangement. The narrator’s version of ostranenie is applied to an eccentric fictional world, reflected, for example, in the profusion of ‘A’ names in the supporting cast (Arjun, Adelle, Andrés, Anisa, Antonio, Aleksy, Anna, Amalia) and, more centrally, in the variety of Thomas’s gifts. The narrator says that ‘there’s no way’ that their interview ‘can cover everything’ Thomas has done and, alluding to Walter Benjamin’s maxim about great works of literature, adds: ‘just a couple of the genres you founded or dissolved’. Filmmaker, translator, film scholar, essayist, art theorist, playwright: Thomas is a composite of half a dozen eminent writers Lerner has known, including Rosmarie Waldrop (whom he interviewed in Providence in 2024), John Ashbery, Alexander Kluge, Colin MacCabe and John Berger – whose story ‘Madrid’, in which a nameless narrator meets the ghost of a former teacher, seems to be the book’s chief influence.

Lerner’s last novel, The Topeka School (2019), was a sort of prequel to his debut Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), in which Adam Gordon, encountered as a feckless aspirant poet in Madrid, is portrayed as a Kansas schoolboy and debating champion. Transcription has a similar, if looser, relationship to 10:04