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Transcription ends with an epilogue. It’s a letter, or at least an extract from a letter, written by Leopold Blaschka, a 19th-century Bohemia-born artist who, with his son Rudolf, crafted intricate and breathtakingly realistic models of flowers, plants and sea creatures made out of glass. So astounding was their technique, so uncanny, that sceptics assumed they must be using secret devices. “It is not so,” he insisted. “We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation.” Until this point, Blaschka hasn’t been referenced by name even once. But here, in coda form, is the essence of Transcription, a novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic.

It begins with a middle-aged American narrator travelling to Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University, where Ben Lerner studied poetry and political theory as an undergraduate. He is there to conduct a magazine interview with a polymathic German intellectual named Thomas. No ordinary assignment: Thomas was his mentor at college, the father of his friend Max, and now, at the age of 90, this conversation is expected to be his last will and testament. At the hotel, bathos strikes – the narrator drops his smartphone in a sink; it’s unusable and he’s too embarrassed to confess. Thomas soon gets into his conversational stride, but his rich sentences go unrecorded.

Another city, another hotel, later in time: the narrator is now in Madrid where, at an art conference devoted to Thomas, he reveals to delegates that that final interview, which many of them had quoted in their talks, was a reconstruction and not the subject’s literal words. What, he ponders self-defensively, was his crime? Then, in the novel’s final section set in Los Angeles, he and Max, now a lawyer, catch up to discuss family affairs in a complex, occasionally mournful exchange that covers technology, the pandemic, eating disorders and, through their perplexed questions about Thomas, memory itself.

There are readers – I count myself among them – who turn to fiction as an antidote to the digital din of everyday life. Just seeing the word “app” on a page is rage-inducing. Technology, though, has penetrated almost every pore of Lerner’s narrator’s consciousness; he reflects that “since at least 2008, to be where I was was too much for me, or too little”. Now to be offline is abnormal, agitative: “I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level.” In another writer’s hands, the novel would be a comic tale of comeuppance.

Lerner is more ambitious. His Thomas – both in dialogue with the narrator and as later recalled by Max – is less a character and closer to one of the Hannah Höch montages he keeps by his fireplace, a Mittel-European philosopher of art and science who speaks in cubist shards. “This I like about Freud – much I don’t like – that every discovery is rediscovery. Cinema recovers cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis.” His layered, associative sentences skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect. A creature of the 20th century, Thomas lived through early interplays of new media and fascism (his father, a Nazi party member, had “radio beliefs” whistling through him), and can discourse with ease on topics such as the sterility of Midi-generated sound. Words on a transcript aren’t everything, he argues. “The meaning is in the cut, the splice.”

Quantum mechanics, psychoacoustics, Frankfurt School philosophy: Lerner doesn’t talk down to his readers. Sometimes he winks: when Thomas asks what the narrator’s daughter is called, the reply is “I call her Eva in this book.” Sometimes he becomes his own exegete: eschewing too rigid a distinction between the real and the inauthentic, his narrator says he could “will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural”. He adds, “Eventually I’d call this ‘fiction’.”

Transcription, for all its riffs on the limits of historiography or of cochlear listening, its invocation of Kafka, its bracing intelligence is at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue: how to get a teenage girl to eat. Max’s account of trying to understand why his daughter has FTT (Failure to Thrive) reads like a horror story, a Covid-era variant of the environmental illness suffered by Julianne Moore’s character in the Todd Haynes film Safe. He and his wife lunge for answers: “to see your child starve herself, to see her – this is how it felt – refuse life, the life you have offered: is it because the life on offer is a lie?”

Here in this final section, Transcription reveals itself as more, far more, than an anthropology of digital modernity. Scraps from earlier in the novel – about voices in the head, suicide attempts, even a seemingly uncrucial factoid about Josef Mengele injecting adrenaline into children’s eyes to change their colour – re-emerge as pre-echoes, ancestral kinship. Across generations there is strange weather, war and its collaterals, isolation, confusion. And it’s precisely in these moments of storytelling and connection that we might, just might, escape the noose of nowness, become touched by an enriched sensation of time.

A foolish dream? “We extend the dream when we share it,” Thomas tells the narrator. “You call it fiction but it is more.”

• Transcription by Ben Lerner is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.