New(ish) Books

Ben Lerner and David Szalay

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a pair of write-ups on recent novels.

Best,

Sam

BEN LERNER’s Transcription (2026)

I don’t know…. Lerner is kind of the one fully acceptable writer. He’s got the chops (he started as a poet!) to be approved by the aesthetes, but he doesn’t write in a particularly avant garde way, his novels are slim and speak to very relatable experiences. Then, there’s the sort of exotic beast aspect of his being the one male writer of his generation who’s really made it, and made it in the traditional way of being a bit truculent, a bit neurotic, but having that work for him. And then he has a thing, of everything being an anxiety attack, of writing from the subcutaneous, deeply frightful, seam of how most of us — well, most millennials anyway — actually view the world. Annie Baker, who should know these things, went far enough to declare, “I’m so scared of contemporary fiction that isn’t Ben Lerner.”

And I’m sympathetic to the cult of Lerner. I liked Leaving the Atocha Station when it came out; like everyone else, drew the line at The Topeka School.

I felt the same excitement from the Atocha Station often enough when I was reading Transcription, especially the early sections. It’s hard to get to a more relatable — or contemporary or subcutaneously awful experience — than dropping your iPhone in water, having it be entirely your own fault, botching the recovery out of your own panic, having the use of the phone be vitally necessary for a series of upcoming functions, and to have to troubleshoot your way back to normalcy, the Apple Store as the end of the rainbow, and winging it until you get there. Lerner’s description of all of this is heartrending in its shameful relatability: “I sat on the bed with my hot device, holding down the side button, praying for the illuminated apple.”

That’s really the high point of the book, the rest of it never quite hits the same magic. The real flaw is that Thomas, the narrator’s mentor and the father of his friend Max, doesn’t register for us as enchanted. He just seems like an old windbag, maybe charismatic to his students, but his fall from grace in his son’s eyes isn’t particularly interesting to us when we haven’t connected to him as anything more than a string of referents and an enticing accent. The second major flaw is that the confabulation that the narrator resorts to, making up some quotes from memory out of his inability to admit to Thomas what happened with the phone, never really resurfaces as a plot point. It’s clear that there’s plenty more where that came from in terms of Thomas‘ storytelling and the loss of an evening’s worth of stemwinding isn’t actually that big of a deal. Lerner doesn’t even try to do much with it — the article comes out fine, Max isn’t really upset. The entire episode seems like an excuse for Lerner to play to his trump suit, which is his ability to describe an anxiety attack that is excruciating for the person having it but wouldn’t make sense to anyone else — a reprise of Adam’s disastrous performance onstage at the panel discussion in Leaving the Atocha Station.

But that had real consequences for Adam. The fact that nothing happens to the Transcription narrator with the botched interview means that we are leaving the domain of the plotted novel and going into something more like atonal music where we can’t really follow along with the beats of what we think is supposed to happen to the characters and instead are almost rebuked for thinking that way. The second half of the novel moves in a completely different direction — Max narrating his very domestic and meaningful dramas of trying to get his daughter to eat and then connecting to his estranged father as he’s dying. As a structure it’s a lot like No One Is Talking About This where the narrator’s Twitter job, the focus of the novel’s first half, is contrasted with the Proteus syndrome of her sister’s daughter in the second. The point of course is that we learn not to care about the ‘portal’ i.e. Twitter, but that doesn’t really work here. What the narrator is up to isn’t trivial — it really is trying to capture the memories of a beloved mentor and we feel that his failure to do so is a moral shortcoming that deserves to be punished as opposed to the narrative just drifting off to something else.

On its own, the second half is perfectly alright. Max’s monologue is moving in itself. It is more grounding and heartfelt than the expostulations of his professor father — this is the moral message Lerner wants to convey — and there is room for brilliant writing in Lerner’s style, with Max subject to the same bouts of incomprehensible anxiety that his friend is, so that the two are neatly paired in a kind of ongoing panic attack that Max’s daughter joins in as well in a more embodied and therefore more dangerous way. It’s a neat contrast of generational angst for Max to see himself through his father’s eyes and think “‘my son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a table with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!” and for us all to understand that there is more emotional weight attached to the corn puffs, an instrument in the battle to rescue Max’s daughter Emmie from her anorexia, than there is in any transformative concert that Thomas might have attended with Adorno. And Max’s call to Thomas, dying of Covid, to tell him that he loves him and forgives him, thereby overcoming a life of coldness and evasion, is moving as all such calls are, even with the Lerneresque touch that Thomas may not have heard his son’s words and didn’t die in any case, and it becomes completely impossible to tell whether the deathbed reconciliation had any effect or not.

This portrait of our alienated time certainly isn’t bad — the image of Thomas dying alone during Covid, no possibility of anybody visiting him, the overwhelmed nurses holding up a phone to his ear, the way that anomie is just in the air: “this seemed like the most natural thing in the world, this microclimate of conviviality, and yet it was a rare experience for me,” Lerner writes in wonder at a perfectly nice friendly evening in Spain. Out of observations like these, Lerner has constructed a kind of courtly style for the end of history — like the music of Messiaen, or Dia Beacon — forboding in its minimalism, in its insistence on the importance of small things, and with its faint gestures in the direction of being more grounded, more in the domain of flesh and blood. It’s really New York Times-approved literature is what it is — and The Times was duly reverential in praising Lerner’s “decathlete’s command of different, overlapping genres.” But the novel, to move forward, has to have a bit more confidence, a bit more animation, than that.

DAVID SZALAY’s Flesh (2025)

I was primed to like this book — it won the Booker and it’s kind of the champion-designate of heterodox space, under the premise that there are all kinds of interesting writers out there, many of them male writing in distinctively male ways, that don’t have the smoothed-out path to success that someone like Lerner does but that find their readership through word of mouth — and I did like it a lot, even though, or maybe because, it was very different than what I thought it would be.

I thought that it would be something like Paul Theroux’s My Secret History, the story of the protagonist’s sex life, but actually there isn’t all that much sex in the book, certainly not as seem indicated by the book’s opening scenes. And then for a while I thought that it was about money, an update of an 18th century tale of the small town boy making it in the big city, but István’s brief foray into wealth and the scandal that eliminates it is very cursorily handled, so much so that Szalay seems to be going out of his way to tell us that that’s not the point. What the book is really about isn’t clear until the very last line, when it turns out to be the story of István’s relationships with other people and how they gradually peter out into a very advanced, aggravated sort of loneliness. Understanding that, István’s monosyllabism — the kind of signature of the book — makes a great deal more sense. He really doesn’t know how to carry himself with others — being told that he’s “not sexy” by a teenage girl is no more or less plausible than being told by the woman he’s driving for that she has “the hots for him.” The events that punctuate his life — the murder he inadvertently commits as a teenager, his military service, his rise to wealth and then the loss of it — seem all to be entirely out of his volition and to have no particular connection with himself. The brief glimpses we get into István’s inner life are variations on this theme. “He has this feeling, with women, that it’s hard to have an experience that feels entirely new, that doesn’t feel like something that has already happened, and will probably happen again in some similar way, so that it never feels like all that much is at stake … so to be with any one person feels like an arbitrary thing,” Szalay writes. And then later: “You have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing.”

That’s what matters — this very deep estrangement István has from everybody except his mother and his son. The way his relationship with Helen is handled is, in this sense, very moving: a confluence of accidents, momentary lusts, bad ideas, that produce the most enduring relationship with another adult that he will have: “It just never occurred to him then, during those first months when they started having sex,” István reflects, that she might end up playing such a significant part in his life.”

Stripped down, the book becomes the narrative of whatever machine is actually running István’s life, somewhere well outside his consciousness or will. István seems reduced to commenting in this phatic way — whole conversations occur with characters just saying “ok” to each other and then either getting it on or not. A great deal happens to him — prison, war, money, fatherhood, etc — but none of it particularly touches him. The ending, which is about as powerful an ending as I can remember reading, is István flipping through photos of his lost son, lost life, trying to understand whether or not it all really happened to him. Everything in the plot equally occurs on the edge of a pin — wealth or impoverishment; picking out a brown dog for his son, or else wife and son turning into an oncoming van — and what’s clear is that the mechanism controlling it, which also seems to be what’s narrating the novel, is something very inhuman, something very distant from István.

And the other key relationship in the novel, between István and his stepson Thomas, occurs similarly in this vein — István and Thomas, despite their many deep similarities, never reaching any real rapport or intimacy. The crux of their relationship is an attempt to bond over tennis — “the first morning after his return they didn’t meet at the court and there was an unspoken understanding that they never would again” — and everything else follows from there, Thomas creating a scene and István attacking him, Thomas duly cutting István off from his money, Thomas giving in to the greatest pleasure that money can buy, which happens to be heroin, István saving Thomas although he could just as easily let him die and the reasons for saving him murky even to him and buried in a wartime trauma.

It’s a grim, if not nihilistic view, of the way life works, and the power of the novel comes largely from the suspicion that it’s all true, all just the way it is — that there’s no free will, no morality, nothing for us to do but wonder at it all.