Transcription by Ben Lerner

In Transcription, Ben Lerner’s narrator refers early on to a seminal moment in his life when he was taken to see Harvard’s glass flowers and began to develop the ability to view nature as culturally constructed and thereby engage with a natural world that had previously left him cold. This ‘new hinge’ in his looking is what he would come to call ‘fiction’, and it is precisely the ease with which reality and fiction can bend and bleed into and simultaneously reveal and obscure each other that Transcription tellingly and unsettlingly explores.

Fittingly for a 21st Century novel dealing with how we perceive and remember, the story’s inciting incident is an innocuous piece of bathos: the narrator drops his iPhone in the sink of his hotel room, killing both it and his ability to record the interview he has come to Providence to conduct. It’s more than an interview, too, because the person he is to speak to is his mentor, Thomas, an academic whose polymathic experience seems to touch upon the history of science, film, literature and art, and who has just turned 90 and almost never gives interviews. Ultimately, the narrator lies to Thomas about being recorded and publishes an interview which acolytes, friends and family come to view as the ‘last… testament’ of a brilliant man.

The interview itself makes up the first section of the novel’s triptych, the second taking place on the evening of an international academic seminar organised by the narrator in Thomas’ memory, and the third being a conversation – more a monologue – between Thomas’ son Max, who does all the talking, and the narrator. In each section, Lerner problematises the narrator’s fateful decision, from Thomas’ voluminous, digressive and infinitely allusive manner of speech, something whose reproducibility from memory is deliberately made to seem near impossible, to errors in the narrator’s memories being pointed out by other characters, to echoes and conflations that confuse relationships between Max, Thomas and the narrator.

What’s most impressive about Lerner’s book is that despite the obvious preoccupation with abstractions, he never takes us away from the human. The narrator’s anxieties over phonelessness; his colleague’s suppressed then accessed anger at finding out the original lie; especially Max’s agonised and forceful telling of his struggles raising a daughter who won’t eat in a meditation on parenting that hits hard – all of these are sensitively, movingly realised.

This is a very short book in which very little actually happens. And it is a book whose characters and ideas trouble and move and enthuse you well beyond its pages. Transcription is terrific.