Transcription by Ben Lerner: A characteristically discursive novella

I reviewed Ben Lerner’s novella 10:04 here over a decade ago, commenting on its many-layered interconnections, impossible to encapsulate in a short post. Since then, I’ve read Leaving the Atocha Station which brought him a great deal of acclaim although, for me, it didn’t match 10.04. Divided into three parts, Transcription is another brief novel which contains a multitude of ideas and themes following our unnamed narrator who sets out to interview his mentor but has a mishap.

I carried it in my palm like a small, wounded animal back into the bathroom and removed the wall-mounted hairdryer from its charger.

Our narrator has returned to Provincetown to interview Thomas, his revered mentor during his student years and the father of his friend Max. Thomas has just turned ninety. This will likely be his last interview. Adding to his anxieties about his daughter who seems on the point of refusing to go to school, our narrator frets about whether his phone will record, knowing that Thomas’s disdain for technology means there will be no backup. Just before he leaves, he knocks it into the basin of water he’d been using to wash his face, setting off fretfully to his mentor’s house where he finds Thomas disconcertingly off kilter. Some time later, having given a keynote speech about his late mentor, prefaced with the amusing anecdote about his phone, he finds himself reproached for his dishonesty in publishing Thomas’s last public testament having not recorded it. In the third episode, Max talks to our narrator about his difficulties with his father and the anxiety of raising a daughter in a world which has changed almost beyond recognition.

I was having an unusual experience of presence – more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapour that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk – but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.   

Characteristically cerebral and discursive, Transcription examines parenthood, technology, memory and relationships between fathers and sons. Lerner is the same age as our narrator, sharing his love of Madrid, suggesting a degree of autofiction that typified his previous novels, but this felt much more personal than 10:04, a working out of ideas. The exploration of our devices’ influence, our slavish dependence on them, is particularly well done, a genie which can’t be forced back in the bottle. The fraught anxieties of modern parenthood contrast with the dysfunction of Max’s relationship with Thomas, his outpouring of things unsaid when he’s told to say goodbye by an ICU medic during lockdown. Memory and its unreliability, in ageing or otherwise, runs through Lerner’s narrative, unsettlingly so, particularly at its end. Not an easy book to write about – I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it has to say – but certainly an impressive one.

Granta Books: London 9781803513805 144 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)