Transcription by Ben Lerner: book review
This is my first book of Ben Lerner's, which is probably important context. I'm not incredibly familiar with him beyond the fact that he's a well-decorated writer who has a connection to the more respected side of the autofiction conversation. I expected formal uniqueness, the chatter around the book promised a reflection on technology after the narrator proceeds to conduct an interview with a dying luminary without a recording device. What I found was thoughtful and interesting, but I question if it was truly a novel? On the one hand, of course it's a novel. Anything that the author decides to label that way is a novel. But, by my particular estimation, what Ben Lerner presents isn't interested in story or narrative enough to truly scratch the itch that fiction typically does. I love when fiction granularly examines the very close realities of the present day, but Lerner's structure often strips out the coherent storytelling element, namely one with even a vague shape of an arc, that left me feeling somewhat baffled by the end. The sentences are clean and engaging but feel more constructed to make a point, as in an essay, than to make a piece of art, as literary novels are.
Transcription takes place in three parts, largely governed by a singular conversation set in each. The first segment takes place in Providence with the narrator going back to his college town to interview one of his former professors for a magazine piece. The professor doesn't have long to live, and this is his final profile. The narrator proceeds to kill his phone by dropping it in the sink at the hotel and therefore has no means to record the conversation. So he fabricates sections of the piece. You would think this inciting incident would lead to the consequences of the story—that's certainly how the blurb makes it sound—but this isn't quite the case. There is fallout from it, seen in the second part, at a conference celebrating the professor's work where our narrator confesses that he fabricated parts of the story, that he didn't have a recording device. People are shocked and angry but in a withdrawn way that the narrator doesn't understand. After that brief moment of friction, that plot thread is entirely dropped. He is told people are upset with him. He seems fairly untouched by this. It does not even make him reflect either positively or negatively on his choices. The third section is just shy of a monologue set in LA from the perspective of the professor's son and narrator's friend, Max. He tells the story of his daughter struggling with ARFID and their desperate attempts as parents to ge their daughter to eat. This then crashes into a story about COVID and the professor ending up in the hospital. As Max tells these stories, many parallels arise with the original conversation, things that the professor was saying then that made no sense but now make clear that he was mixing the narrator and his son around in his confusion. These parallels are interesting, satisfying, and revealing to finally understand what the lengthy oendering of the interview is there for, but they aren't quite profound or necessary enough to make this feel like a coherent novel or to justify the more stale parts of the dialogue.
I struggled to find what the integral piece of story was and what was grafted on to make the book a sellable length. When I took it apart, I could see the vague links between sections, but none of them felt like the true heart of the novel, the piece that would cause the engine to break without its presence. Maybe the issue is that there's simply no engine.
In the first section, the best writing comes as the narrator remembers his tumultuous college days as he spends time in Providence, seeing his past life jump out of the walls. The conversation with the professor, the long chunks of heady dialogue that have no apparent purpose, grows tedious over time. I don't explicitly need the books I read to be building somewhere or have an obvious point, but I often felt unmoored in this novel in a way that didn't compel me to keep reading. Really, it's simply the brevity of the novel that does that. Lerner is clearly an immensely talented writer, especially on the sentence level, but this is a story without engine. It's more akin to a collection of essays where Lerner uses each segment of conversation to tackle an aspect of modern life he wants to discuss and dissect.
The explorations of these topics are compelling. The son discussing watching his father nearly die of COVID is horrifying and gripping and moving and strange and incredibly real. The narrator's strange feelings when being estranged from his phone also point out a strange modern phenomenon—now when we are without our phone we feel we are missing a limb—and I enjoyed watching these strange thoughts about modern reality be intellectualized. Lerner beautifully writes about how when we're mediated through technology, we all move and shift. At one point, when the narrator talks to his young daughter on the phone, he thinks, "Her voice, isolated from her image, was aged. I don't mean that it sounded like the voice of an older person, but that the sound itself, like starlight or the light in an old painting, had traveled many years to reach me, bore the traces of that transit from the future or the past, the sound of a distance brought near, but left intact." Gorgeous, right, especially the bit about the light in an old painting? He's making this call on the professor's landline because of his own broken phone, and he remembers what it was like to use the landline as a kid himself and there's this spectacular line of memory that holds a whole story in itself, "I remember eavesdropping on my sister's calls—less on the conversation than on their breathing, her friends' breathing during the long stretches of silence while they watched TV..."
Maybe the best example of bringing in modern conversation is when Max is describing his struggle to get his daughter to eat and how they try offering candy, unmitigated junk food, and then unmitigated screen time in the hopes that something will shift in her young mind. And it works. Enraptured by YouTube, the girl starts eating. His eight-year-old ditches the Octonauts and becomes obsessed with unboxing videos. Lerner does an incredible job of rendering the immense strangeness of this type of content—its eerie, horrifying nature—while making no commentary on the content himself. He just spells out what an ASMR unboxing video is in immense, clinical, disquieting detail. And as Max watches his daughter watch this woman with long pink nails unbox various things and she tells him that she watches these videos because they're satisfying, his brain likens the videos to porn. And he's not wrong. While the whole passage is incredible, the sentence that most distills the realization is: "Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?"
Beyond the arguments and presentation of the world, there are many scenes that just have incredible literary value. I read it with a pen in hand, grabbing tiny snippets of words aligned in truly exciting ways. When the narrator drowns his phone, Lerner writes, "For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged," and I was utterly delighted. When the narrator is in a flashback to his college days, which he now looks back on from middle age, I was utterly taken with the aside that, "I was still young enough that the months were long." I stood on the tram platform and thought that I was close in age to this younger version of the narrator and that I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about how life feels like it's moving very fast but the months are also very long. It was striking to think that this is just the phase of life that I exist in. That time moves in this way now, as it apparently does for everyone my age, but it won't always. I also adored the phrase, "... form little pockets of intimacy."
So there was obviously plenty that I loved here. I found it an incredibly satisfying piece of thought, a less satisfying novel. Hopefully that's a helpful observation in calibrating expectations accordingly if you're considering wading into Transcription without heaps of context as I did.
I am curious, if anyone has read more of Lerner's other novels, whether they are more classically novel-eque than this one or if this is simply his mode. The others, I believe, are longer, so I'd imagine there's more story there.
Overall: 3.5
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