Transcription by Ben Lerner

And now I felt that Thomas had arranged the exchange he was listening in on (but surely he wasn't listening), that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating with the small waves hit them--You call this fiction, but it is more.

In the third section of Ben Lerner's new novel Transcription, a man named Max is describing his relationship with his father, a respected but somewhat eccentric academic named Thomas. Thomas, Max describes, grows sick during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Max is told by the hospital that he should say goodbye to his father. The iPad they use for these last goodbyes is on the fritz, so Thomas must deliver his last words over the phone. When I read this, I had to put the book down for a moment--it brought back so strongly the memory of telling my own father that I loved him over the phone. Like my own father, Thomas is too weak to respond, and it's unclear whether Max has been heard at all. Unlike my father, Thomas recovers somewhat miraculously. Though he dies somewhat later, the question remains: what has been communicated and how? Have the iPad, the phone, led to a true message being sent and received? 

Max's section isn't what you'll find in most summaries of Transcription, which begin with the narrator of the first section, the classic Ben Lerner stand-in, who has returned to Providence to interview Thomas, his mentor. The narrator accidentally drops his phone in the toilet, and is unable to record the conversation, which he is meant to write up, so he attempts to do it from memory. Later on, he confesses this somewhat sheepishly, but what he thought would be a funny anecdote turns out to enrage people, because the interview has come to be considered the (now) dead Thomas' last words. I will say that Transcription is not what I expected from this description: I thought we would get some sort of metafictional text, a cobbling together of reportage and memory, that asks us to comb through and interrogate it in order to separate the truth from falsity, or to show us that such a task is in truth impossible. But Lerner mostly plays it straight; whether the reported conversation is original or not seems not to be the question.

Instead, the novel seemed to me about the way that technology has shaped the way we communicate with each other, for better or worse. Whether the conversation is genuine or not, did Thomas' belief that he was being recorded change what he said? Can the medium, even when not in use, change the message? Lerner explores these ideas in a dozen ways, including the shame and frustration that the narrator shows in not being able to FaceTime his daughter before bed, nor let her know that he can't. These themes show up in the hospital iPad, obviously, but I thought they were most interestingly explored when, in the third section, Max describes the struggles he's had with his daughter, who engages in severe food refusal. The only thing that works, it turns out, is to let her watch YouTube while she eats. Is this a distraction? Or a lifeline? Can it be both? We all worry about the "iPad generation," of course, but even the technology that steals our attention, or worse, turns out to have its lifesaving uses. For better or worse, we're all wired now, and though we make a practice of lamenting what it's done to us, it is easier than ever to be heard. 

As with most of Lerner's books, this sounds a lot more simplistic in my rendering than it is on the page. I respect and admire his ability to explore the themes that seem so vital to us, and yet are so difficult to talk about; you never leave one of his novels thinking that it's not really relevant to you or the world in which you live. This one won't have the staying power of The Topeka School or Leaving the Atocha Station, but I think I'll remember what it expresses about our wired--or I suppose, now, wireless--world for a long time.