Overview
“Transcription” gave me that wonderful experience where I felt completely mesmerized while reading it, and now that I've finished, I can't stop thinking about it. There were a couple of coincidences with things happening in my own life at the moment that made it feel like the perfect book for me to read right now, almost like the stars had aligned.
I also want to emphasize that this book contains so many ideas, and is incredibly smart and well-crafted, touching on technology, science, history, memory, art, literature, and dreams, that from descriptions alone or from other reviews, it might sound like an intimidating, intellectual novel. But I want to assure you it's also extremely emotional. There's a great deal in it about familial relationships, about anxiety for the next generation and their struggles, about fathers and daughters, and about adult men's relationships to a father figure or mentor. It's about grief, mourning, and romance.
Premise
The novel's unnamed narrator, who is 45, travels to Providence, Rhode Island to interview Thomas, a 90-year-old, weighty intellectual of both the arts and sciences, in what will likely be his last interview ever. The interviewer brings his smartphone to record the conversation, but accidentally drops it in a sink of water, breaking it. Unable to record the interview, he ends up, in a moment of quiet absurdity, setting his broken phone down anyway when Thomas insists he start recording — pretending to record while nothing is actually being captured. So everything we get from that interview is not a transcription at all, but the narrator's later reconstruction of it from memory.
Thomas's Voice
Thomas speaks in this wonderful, associative way, poetic but packed with references to art, science, and historical figures, his train of thought skipping from one thing to another almost the way the narrator of “Ducks, Newburyport” does. I loved reading his diatribes the way I love listening to some of my own favorite mentors: people so full of knowledge and ideas that it just flows out of them. Even though I probably only understood about half of what Thomas was actually referencing, I was completely mesmerized consuming it. That's part of the magic of what Lerner does here — you feel like you're really sitting attentively listening to someone speak following their winding train of thought with all its warm playfulness and humor. I found his sections extremely enjoyable.
But the way the novel is constructed calls into question everything Thomas has said, and whether what we're getting is really the truth, since the whole premise rests on an interview that technically never happened as a recording. It's smart in how it uses that situation to say so much more.
A Personal Coincidence
I happened to be reading this on a day when I was about to interview Joyce Carol Oates, someone I revere as an idol and mentor and who was about to turn 88. I felt that same thrill about being able to speak with someone I admire so much, and that same anxiety about the possibility of technology going wrong, since we've had instances before where a Zoom call wouldn't connect. Reading about the narrator's fraught relationship to recording technology while gearing up for my own high-stakes interview felt like an uncanny echo.
Unboxing Videos and Self-Consciousness Online
Later in the book, Thomas's adult son Max has a daughter, Emmy, who has almost no appetite and struggles to eat no matter what her parents try. Eventually she starts watching unboxing videos on YouTube, which lulls her into a comforting state where she's able to eat while watching, though Max speaks about these videos quite disparagingly, dismissing them as trivial. Coincidentally, I'd also made a recent video unboxing books for my own channel. So I felt very self-conscious reading a book that critiques these videos while I'm making them myself. It made me think about my own anxieties about participating in this kind of content: I know I didn't invent the unboxing video, I'd just seen others doing it and thought it looked fun, especially around books that publishers had sent me. I do sometimes worry whether I'm trivializing the experience of reading by making these casual videos rather than sitting down to formulate a more considered review — though I also know plenty of readers respond to that instantaneous, unfiltered reaction to new books just as much as, if not more than, a carefully composed one. Lerner's novel set me off on a long train of thought about performative reading online and my own place in it.
I also want to point out “Transcription”'s clever cover design: it has the appearance of a large smartphone with a record button.
Technology, Memory, and Dependence
The novel isn't condemning technology so much as genuinely interrogating it, weighing its pros and cons and situating recent technology within a much longer history of technological change. Thomas recalls getting a radio for the first time as a young man, and has strange theories about how even when a radio is off, the sound waves are technically still passing through the air, an idea that resonates with how our data now sits somewhere in "the cloud," a constant unseen presence in our lives whether we're actively engaging with it or not. There's real insight into our dependency on technology: even after the narrator's phone breaks, he compulsively keeps trying to turn it on, and keeps thinking in terms of the maps app to get to Thomas's house even though he already knows the way from memory. I recognized that in myself, too — I'll sometimes use maps to get somewhere in central London even after living here long enough to know the route by heart.
Fact, Fiction, and the Line Between Them
Because the interview was never actually recorded, what we get is not a transcription but a reconstruction, and the novel is remarkably smart about calling into question whether that reconstruction is even true, or whether the narrator has misremembered, improvised, or even fictionalized parts of it. The book is structured in three sections: the narrator's account of the interview; a section that interrogates that very interview, revealing in something like a memorial speech that it was reconstructed rather than transcribed; and a third section that shifts to Max, Thomas's son, and his anxieties about his daughter's condition (referred to in the book as "failure to thrive") alongside his own complicated relationship with his father.
I love how the title itself, Transcription, carries so much weight here — "trans" as a prefix meaning beyond or on the other side of, so that in some sense our memory itself becomes a kind of bridge between past and present, and the novel keeps asking what gets lost or altered in that crossing. There are also references throughout to literal borders, including the border between occupied France and Switzerland during the war, where Jewish refugees escaping arrest could not be captured once they crossed it — a reminder that borders are themselves agreed-upon fictions that nonetheless carry enormous real-world weight. The book uses small, concrete examples too, like the narrator touching what he assumes is an artificial flower in a hotel lobby only to discover it's real, while recalling elaborately designed glass flowers in a museum that look completely authentic but are actually constructed. All of this speaks to a larger, timely anxiety about how much we can trust the information we're given, whether online, in the news, or handed down to us as history — and the novel gently suggests this uncertainty isn't new, even if it feels newly urgent.
Voice and Connection
Set in recent times, the novel touches on the COVID pandemic, during which Thomas became seriously ill and Max feared, for a time, that his father was going to die. There's an incredibly emotional crisis point where Max speaks to Thomas on the phone believing he might be losing him, and everything spills out of him, years of tension between them, much of it rooted in the death of Max's mother by suicide when he was younger, a loss that hovers over the whole novel as an absence. It made me think about how much of what we say in moments of extreme emotional intensity is a true confession or actually authentic, and how much is shaped by the situation itself, and whether that even matters. So much of this novel is really about voice and connection: not necessarily the content of what we say to each other, but the meaning carried in simply speaking and being heard, whether that's Max on the phone with his dying father or the narrator worrying over trivial conversations with his own young daughter.
Verdict
There's so much in this book that just keeps prompting me to think further. It doesn't offer answers to the larger questions it raises about fact versus fiction, technology, memory, and authenticity, but it poses them so richly that I know I'll want to reread it. I love one line from the book: "You call this fiction, but it is more." I think that's true of the novel itself — Ben Lerner packs an enormous amount into a fairly slim book, and I found that genuinely impressive.
I absolutely loved reading this, and if you've read it too, I'd love to hear what you thought, or whether it resonated with anything going on in your own life. If you haven't read it yet, I'd highly encourage you to pick it up, and don't be intimidated by the perception that it's some grand intellectual work. It's smart, yes, but it's also, as I hope I've conveyed, deeply emotional and genuinely funny, and that combination is exactly why I loved it so much.
Since I initially posted a video about this book it’s also gone on to win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
