Review of Transcription by Ben Lerner

Lerner's slim novel offers three distinct sections. In the first, a pivotal, wandering interview fails to be recorded; then the "reconstructed" aspect of that interview becomes clear; and ultimately, issues of memory, parenthood, technology, art, faulty recollections, and forgiveness shape the story.

The unnamed narrator of Ben Lerner's short (144-page) novel has traveled to interview his 90-year-old mentor Thomas (who is also his best friend Max's father) to write what will likely be the art world giant's final published interview.

But when the narrator drops his phone in the hotel sink beforehand, he arrives at Thomas's home without a way to record--and whether due to embarrassment, an unexplained inability to shift plans, or what seems to be a mysterious compulsion, he is unable or unwilling to reveal this fact.

In Transcription, Lerner offers a novel in three parts, including the strange set of events that follow the smartphone fiasco.

In the first section, our narrator begins a false start of an interview, posing initial questions to Thomas and pretending to record, yet all the while suggesting that the real interview occur the following day--when he believes he will have a working recording mechanism.

That evening, Thomas offers some gems of memories but frequently departs abruptly from the posed topic or query and heads into the conversational ether, abandoning any link to logic or conventional discourse in order to put forth ideas about dreams the narrator have had that he posits have intersected with his own reality and his own dreams; nebulous artistic concepts; and faulted recollections in which he conflates his somewhat estranged son Max and his interviewer. This is a disjointed section of text, full of stops and starts, hesitancy on the narrator's part, bossy pushiness from Thomas, confusion, strange mental wanderings, and indications that Thomas is experiencing dementia.

A skip in time to the book's second section finds various academics in Spain honoring Thomas after his death. We witness the shock waves of our narrator's casual admission that he "reconstructed" portions of his pivotal, often-quoted, seminal final interview with the artist.

The final section of the novel was the most compelling, poignant, and beautiful for me. Thomas's son Max explores his daughter's eating difficulties, his heartfelt, eloquent last words to his father (who survived his severe case of Covid, and who later seemed to have no recollection of that outpouring of forgiveness and the generous, sweeping understanding shown by his son), and his fraught relationship with his father.

Memory, technology, parenting, vulnerability, dreams, and faulty recollections all shape the book's events and its characters.

This was a fascinating, brief read. The sections felt somewhat disjointed, but the final portion of the book was lovely and drew the points of view and elements together.

More Titles to Explore

Ben Lerner is also the author of The Topeka School, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Hatred of Poetry.

For more short books I've Bossily reviewed, please check out the titles at this link.