Transcription

In his first book of fiction since the acclaimed The Topeka School, Transcription by Ben Lerner is a novel told in three parts. A familiar narrator, away from his wife and child, travels to interview his mentor Thomas, an esteemed academic in failing health and father of the narrator’s university friend Andreas.

Experienced largely through conversations with the narrator, part one centres on a failed attempt to record an interview with Thomas. Part two is a debrief with an old friend – and possible former flame – after a conference posthumously celebrating Thomas’s career. Part three takes the form of a confessional with Andreas who, after his father’s death, recounts his struggles with his preteen daughter and the tensions that develop between father and son.

The novel takes place during the pandemic, when – despite hesitation or resistance – our phones and laptops became the primary form of connection with the wider world. Lerner examines how technology can paralyse us: as a physical barrier and as a force keeping us in time, on time and up-to-date. The characters, through mundane crisis, find themselves without technology. Once free of its stimulus, they are transported back in memory, reliving past events while awake.

Lerner celebrates the ephemeral: the beauty of things in decay, music as a soundtrack to our lives, and memory keeping the past alive in our minds and bodies – defying the fact-checking and timekeeping of our phones and tablets. We are reminded of the power of lived experience: the performative, the imagined, the intuited, and the sometimes falsely remembered.

Part of the novel’s charm is that each character is an unreliable narrator. As conversations unfold, confusion and disagreement emerge about what truly happened in the past; memories conflict and overlap. But that is the point: a series of transcriptions is always taking place – recorded or remembered, each of us is continually experiencing, rewriting and retelling our own fiction.