Necessary Estrangements

Finn Macdonald reviews Ben Lerner's Transcription and Katie Kitamura's Audition

In Transcription (2026), Ben Lerner’s fourth novel, an interview is sabotaged. We meet the novel’s unnamed narrator as he travels to take the final testimony of his former mentor, Thomas. The conversation is imminent and the narrator is preparing in the Hotel Providence when he drops his iPhone, the intended recording device, into the bathroom sink. The screen goes dark and will not wake. Short on time and unable to confess this accident, he arrives at Thomas’s apartment for the interview: as they begin to talk, the narrator places his broken phone upon the table and fakes the act of recording. The novel that follows is a product of this little deception, a sly and shifting meditation on memory, technology, and the impossibility of speaking plainly.

Transcription has three acts, each a conversation: the interview between Thomas and the narrator (‘Hotel Providence’), a discussion years later about the reliability of the transcript of this interview (‘Hotel Villa Real’), and, later again, a conversation between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max (‘Hotel Arbez’). Across these discussions, Thomas’s life is brought slowly to light, from his childhood in 1930s Germany to his academic career and his declining health during lockdown, and we learn of the parallel families of Max and the narrator, each of them the father to a young daughter. The novel is restless and relishes uncertainty, shifting abruptly between its sections. Lerner’s prose is direct and disorienting, as when the novel’s inciting incident is delivered with the shock of a simple-sentence summary: ‘I somehow knocked the phone into the water’. Taken in its totality, the novel is a study of interrupted communication. The broken phone is the first interruption, preventing the creation of a stable transcript of the interview with Thomas. Later, when the narrator reveals during an academic presentation that the interview transcript was written from memory, he is met with unexpected anger from the audience. Realising this, he imagines ‘the printout of [the] talk [...] rearranging itself – some personal introductory remarks about my foolishness [...] recomposing [...] into a startling confession’. Speech is estranged from its source of meaning, and even chosen words cannot choose their effect. Later, in ‘Hotel Arbez’, when Max recounts making a frantic phone call to Thomas on his deathbed, he is left to wonder if any of the message has been received by his father: ‘I couldn’t shake the suspicion […] that he had taken it in, that it hadn’t disappeared, that it was transcribed somewhere inside of him’. Lost, misread, lodged somewhere we cannot see; in Transcription, no message reaches its recipient intact. 

‘I wanted [Transcription] to be more haunting than explanatory’, Lerner told Alexandra Schwartz in an interview at New York’s Pioneer Works, and the book achieves this aim. Along with its ghostly communications and lost meanings, the novel abounds with symbols of uncanny duality. There is repeated mention of the ‘glass flowers’ in the Harvard Natural History Museum, ‘anatomically perfect’ representations of plants that seem ‘organic one instant and [...] artificial the next’, obsessing the narrator as a young student with their eerie doubling. Elsewhere, Thomas makes repeated reference to the Hotel Arbez, a building located simultaneously in Switzerland and France, and he continually confuses Max and the narrator, telling each stories about the other. The cumulative effect of this constant doubling is disorienting: by the novel’s end, the backstories of Max and the narrator have become difficult to distinguish, the chronology is unclear, and the book demands a hurried second reading. In this way, through both form and content, the novel is concerned with the inevitable estrangements of communication, with the gap between an utterance and its representation. Can any record – a memory, a write-up, a voice recording, a novel – constitute a reliable transcription? To read the novel is to be nudged into adopting a readerly version of Keats’s negative capability, to dwell for the book’s duration in ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. 

At Transcription’s end, I was reminded of the state in which I was left upon finishing Katie Kitamura’s Audition (2025). These two novels bear uncanny similarity. In both, an unnamed narrator navigates an estranged and ambiguous family dynamic. Both books are brief (coming to fewer than 200 pages), both feature jarring transitions between the sections of their narrative, and both investigate the capacity of the contemporary novel to provoke disorientation in a reader, to abide in uncertainty. Audition begins with its nameless narrator, an actor, meeting a young man named Xavier who claims to be her biological son. The narrator has never had children, and she believes that Xavier must be ‘in the grip of some delusion, or [...] a grifter of some kind’, dismissing his suggestion outright. The pair drink coffee together and prepare for her upcoming play while the narrator ponders this strange encounter. Then the novel’s second half begins, and the narrative resumes seemingly unchanged, with only one alteration: Xavier and the narrator are now mother and son, and they apparently always have been. The narrator reports gaps in her memory, ‘a certain thinness’ in her sense of their shared history – but isn’t this just ‘what it [means] to have a child grow up’, to accept change, to live through the ‘necessary estrangement’? 

By the end of Audition, a reader is left guessing as to where to locate the lapse. Which half of Audition is real, and which half is the performance? Did the narrator and Xavier play at being mother and son, or have they played at being strangers? The conclusion reached by the narrator is that no performance is more uncanny than a family, our ‘shared delusion’ and ‘mutual construction’. Where Lerner chooses technology as his theme, with its capacity to enable and to interrupt communication, Kitamura chooses performance art. Acting, she writes, is ‘not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind’. There are echoes of Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist (2001) here, where ghostly figures arrive as avatars of lost family, and of Joachim Trier’s most recent film, Sentimental Value (2025), where an actor is reunited with her estranged father to collaborate on his latest script. 

Throughout Audition, the narrator is fixated on ambiguous looks and minute gestures (the ‘small, conspiratorial smile’, the ‘synchronized movement’, the ‘infinitesimal [...] pause’). Early in the novel, she spots a particular gesture that Xavier has been repeating. Watching, the narrator realises with dawning disquiet that he is replicating a signature gesture she has deployed throughout her career: ‘He sat back in his chair and exhaled and I recognized the movement [...] An old gesture of mine that he had lifted from my films [...] A piece of me, on the body of a stranger, a thing of mine had been taken and moved into the realm of the uncanny by this young man’. She imagines a range of motivations for this theft. Has the gesture ‘simply crept from my body into his by repeated observation’? Or is it an inherited action, proof ‘that there was indeed a semblance between us’? Or is it ‘a gesture of intimidation’, a threat, the work of a ‘con artist’? Kitamura turns this gesture in the light, imbuing it with various, contradictory meanings, imagining in a small exhalation and a straightened spine a catalogue of possible intentions. Epitomised here is the pleasure of both of these novels, their mutual depiction of uncertainty as a site of interpretation, rather than vacancy. ‘The meaning is the cut,’ Thomas tells us in Transcription. ‘So what you cut is present, the dark matter’. After these books are finished, the interpretations persist, as some part of us still watches ‘the slight slump of the shoulders’ and ‘the fluttering of the lips at the exhalation of air’. Art by Pascal Sleigh