Book reviews: ‘Transcription’ and ‘The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness’

‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner

“As ever with Ben Lerner’s novels, the plot of Transcription is sparse, propelled mostly by the characters’ winding speech and the narrator’s thoughts,” said Hannah Gold in Harper’s. But even at 144 pages, it’s a “remarkable” book, one that suggests human consciousness, and thus our individual experience of the self, has been forever changed by the phones most of us now carry in our pockets. “The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices”: It opens with its unnamed Lerner-like narrator accidentally dropping his phone in a sink of water, triggering a foolish bit of subterfuge. When this middle-aged poet meets with his former mentor, a renowned 90-year-old intellectual, for what’s likely to be the older man’s final interview, he pretends that the broken phone is recording, then creates a faked transcript. As events play out, Lerner’s writing “crackles with new insights, images, motifs.”

“In another writer’s hands, the novel would be a comic tale of comeuppance,” said Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian. “Lerner is more ambitious.” The voice of the German-born mentor, Thomas, unfolds in “layered, associative sentences” that “skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect,” and although the narrator is lambasted when, in the novel’s middle section, he reveals at a symposium lecture after Thomas’ death that he reconstructed Thomas’ words. Lerner doesn’t end there. He adds a third section that finds the narrator in dialogue with an old friend, Max, who was also Thomas’ only son. That pair’s conversation touches on technology, parenting, and the Thomas they both knew, and yet the bristling intelligence of their back-and-forth is “at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat.” Max has watched his only daughter waste away, pained that she seems, in his eyes, to be rejecting the life provided to her because that life is a lie.

Such ideas “risk becoming arid, and there are certainly times when Lerner overexplains them,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. But “Lerner’s method is to flicker between humor and heartbreak,” and Transcription “mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-narrator.” Max recalls having his own final interview with Thomas, a remote phone-assisted conversation he recorded while Thomas lay dying in isolation because of Covid restrictions, yet that scene too is “ultimately reconfigured in surprising ways, leaving its meanings bracingly indefinite.” It remains a striking moment, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. These days, “smartphones have become so integral to our lives that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, is winning.”

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‘The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness’ by Arthur C. Brooks

“You might call Arthur C. Brooks ‘the happiness professor,’” said Anna Maxted in The Telegraph (U.K.). For the past decade, after all, the 61-year-old author and former president of the center-right American Enterprise Institute has been a Harvard faculty member teaching a popular course on the science of happiness. Beyond that—“and what a rare thing”—when he speaks about the importance of aspiring to what he calls moral beauty, he embodies the practice. His latest best seller, The Meaning of Your Life, aims to help anyone who finds that, even while enjoying successes by many measures, their existence feels empty. Self-focus alone, of course, “doesn’t bring happiness.” Even so, he shows how it can, when done right, lead to a surer sense of life purpose.

Brooks is “remarkably ill-equipped” to dispense such wisdom, said Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker. He has made a career of parroting the fashionable ideas of the conservative establishment while avoiding taking meaningful stands. Now that he’s turned to self-help, a tack that has earned him hefty speaking fees and the privilege of co-authoring a 2023 best seller with Oprah Winfrey, the counsel he offers gets readers only so far. “Who would deny,” for example, “that we would all do better to turn off our phones, interact with other human beings, and maybe even go outside for a walk every once in a while?” Unfortunately, Brooks misuses science, and he “struggles when he strays into the rugged realm of philosophy.” Not surprisingly, he advises against trying to ascertain what’s true and right, or fighting for it. Instead, “he eschews all convictions, save those about what makes people feel better.”

Even so, much of Brooks’ advice rates as “wise and sometimes urgently needed counsel,” said Matt Reynolds in Christianity Today. He tells us to cultivate loving relationships, to seek out beauty, to pursue a professional calling, to ponder big questions, to engage in regular spiritual or philosophical study, and to learn from suffering rather than try to avoid it. When it comes to life’s meaning, though, his advice “remains curiously individualistic.” In short, you have to figure it out yourself.