The premise of Ben Lerner’s slim new novel, Transcription, is an interview gone wrong. When the book’s unnamed narrator – another variation on the same thinly veiled autobiographical stand-in at the center of all his novels (Lerner’s version of “Larry David” in Curb, which is to say David’s character’s obverse: a one-man comedy of overthinking) – when this wishy-washy schmuck of a middle-aged writer arrives in Providence, RI, to interview his college mentor, Thomas, the worst thing he can imagine happening happens. While preparing for the interview, brushing his teeth and then washing his face in the hotel bathroom, he accidentally knocks his phone into the sink.
The prose-interruption of a dinkus follows –
* * *
– and the first line that flows in to fill the silence of that “oh shit” moment is perfectly, metafictively arch: “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged.”
It’s just the sort of incident a writer like Larry David might have conjured up to animate an episode of Seinfeld, the humor a function of the narrator’s ridiculous inability to enact the simple solution that his problem demands. Because it isn’t just that he lacks a backup method for recording the interview scheduled that evening with Thomas (though one does wonder, if the slightest bit inquisitive, why he couldn’t bring his laptop along to serve the same function). No, the real problem is that the narrator so fears disapproval that he finds himself unable to tell Thomas the truth.
So he shows up that evening at his mentor’s house, ready to talk but unprepared to reproduce their words for the magazine that commissioned the interview. (Pity the loss of Boswell’s ingenuity, dashing to the loo to scribble Johnson’s remarks on the insides of his shirtsleeves!) What ensues is an interchange of Qs and As but also, pointedly, of misses and whiffs – every manner of rupture and rift in the stream of information that can flow between two people, from the misheard phrase and the misremembered detail to the mistaken identity. Despite being classed among “the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology,” an irresistible “cross between Wonka and Bergman” with the thick, white mane of an elderly John Berger – for all his vitality and stature, Thomas’s mind is not what it once was. He misremembers with the overconfidence of youth (with the stochastic overreach of a large language model), even occasionally confusing the narrator, seated directly before him, for his middle-aged son, Max. It doesn’t help how loosely he handles time. A joke that always made his father laugh, more than three quarters of a century ago in Germany – does humor ever age well? – fails to land with the narrator.
“[B]ut his laugher was lined with anger. Do you take more coffee? Wine?”
“Wine, thanks. They – the magazine – want background, basic facts. How did your father make a living, for example. He was an engineer?”
“Yes. Bridges, dams. But what I am saying is that radio, it is a recovery. Of the voice without the body. That like everything new, it is also ancient. The truly new touches something before the merely recent. This I like about Freud – much I don’t like – that every discovery is rediscovery. Cinema recovers cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis. Because for all of us the first experience of language is voices traveling through the mother’s body.”
All this talk comes across as – well – talk, as much clarification of substance as substance itself, which is to say: not very much like an interview. Like any novel worth its salt, Transcription wants to feel real, to pluck and drop its reader into what John Gardner called the “vivid and continuous dream” of good fiction. It’s also a poet’s novel; it strives to be clever, and often is: much of Transcription offers itself up as – you guessed it – a transcript. Or at least you can’t help thinking of it as such. This basic tension – between reality and representation, between the room where it happened and the page on which it was reported – is the book’s beating heart. It’s an admittedly brainy heart, but it’s a heart all the same. It turns out that the apparatus of actual speech (marred by halting observations, hacking coughs, the need to pee, and the like) tends to radically diverge from the finished, polished, highly edited versions that we, the readers, encounter when the words go to print. Lending verisimilitude to a fictional character’s speech patterns has never been easy to do, but Lerner’s talent is evident on every page, especially when Thomas lets it rip: the old man’s knack for esoteric association, the organic meander, means he’s never on topic for long, his main mode the rapid digression, wave upon wave of arcane stuff sweeping both narrator and reader away. Such a floodtide of ideas has the disarming habit of washing one up at the bottom of the page, imparting the novel impression that this book’s propulsiveness may just come at the expense of the reader’s autonomy.
A starved-thin middle section (titled “[Hotel Villa Real]”) reveals the outcome of the first section’s unrecorded evening – no spoilers here – before leaping, in swift, modern, juxtaposing fashion, to the book’s third and final section.
Roughly the same length as Part 1 (“Hotel Providence”), Part 3 (“Hotel Arbez”) features the same narrator, though here, responsible for only thirtyish words across twice as many pages, his presence grows almost absurdly attenuated – a canny articulation of Guy Davenport’s dictum (from his own heavily edited interview with The Paris Review) that “[w]e talk at each other, not to.” In Part 3, the microphone passes from father to son, but Max’s monologue – an outpouring – doesn’t just outdo his father’s for volubility; it buries it beneath a Bernhardian avalanche. When the narrator does chime in, it’s only to quietly imply how much he and Max have in common. Both men are:
- Married
- 45 years old
- Graduates of Brown University (where Thomas taught)
- Successes in their respective fields
- Fathers of young daughters
- Constitutionally incapable of standing up to their father (figure).
It’s the same father (figure) that patterns the sensibility of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (another triptych in prose in which a comic protagonist gradually vanishes into the background of the final panel): that is, a father (figure) both authoritative and impersonal. Thomas might not be one for hurling apples, but the tension that ripples around Max’s every mention of him makes it manifest that words and postures are more than capable of breaking metaphorical bones, if not the literal ones.
While Part 3 swaps the hijinks of Part 1 for the pathos of a genuinely confounding family drama, textual cleverness remains a salient feature throughout. It’s only after launching some distance into Part 3, in fact, that Lerner’s spectacular capacity for suggestion – for adapting the conventions of poetry to prose – finds its fullest expression. When Max swings the narrative focus to spotlight his daughter, Emmie, a whole range of images, ideas, and concepts, already neatly established in Part 1, begin their (possibly too-neat) stepwise recurrence, so that Part 3 gradually grows to resemble a mirror-image of Part 1. By way of just one illustration: When Emmie’s disordered eating sends her parents in desperate search of a stratagem to cut through her inexplicable, Bartlebyan refusal to meet her daily caloric needs, Thomas’s bygone reference to Kafka’s tale of the hunger artist echoes and reverberates.
The effect, subtly orchestrated throughout this section with a remarkably light touch, is entrancing. Resonance often is. In his 2011 debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner’s alter ego describes being just the right amount of high on hash in a public place, achieving the inescapably satisfying feeling of congruence that comes with having one’s antennae tuned to life’s dominant frequency, awakened to “the texture of et cetera itself.” Such deliberately heightened rhetoric somewhat obscures the moment’s typically elusive, short-lived nature, but this novel – jeweled, heady, brief – offers a strikingly effective approximation of just such an experience.
Transcription succeeds because it dares, within notably narrow confines, to go places typically reserved for much longer novels, if not other, more abstract art forms entirely – straight into the snares of complex social experience, where language frequently fails. An ostensible commentary on technology (the UK edition of the novel goes for broke on the centrality of the smartphone, its barebones cover sporting the single red circle of the iPhone’s Voice Memos app), this is, above all, a story about interpersonal relationships. Far from an overt assessment of our algorithm-addicted present, Transcription reinvigorates attention to the quality of our communication, digital and IRL. The book’s two or three profoundly felt, deftly drawn scenes of human drama stick in memory with all the force of a personal trauma. Lerner doles out a multitude of morsels, formally delicious, for the ambitious reader’s mind to mull, but it’s ultimately these few scenes of cowardice and cringing, of courage and compassion that stay with you. The refusal to resolve any of it neatly isn’t a refusal of narrative art; it’s a calculated decision designed to inspire the awe that engenders rereading. Transcription is short enough to make doing so a nonissue. Besides, you’ll just straight-up want to.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books. His essays and reviews have appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, and American Book Review, among others.