“Transcription”
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
“Transcription,” a short novel by Ben Lerner, begins with every journalist’s worst nightmare: an interview with a world-renowned, 90-year-old artist in his last days that, thanks to a waterlogged phone, can’t be recorded.
Of course, an actual journalist in this situation would take thorough notes and bring a laptop, not just a phone. But the book’s unnamed narrator seems to have arrived in Providence from a New York-based hub of academia, not a newsroom. So after he drops his phone in his hotel sink, his first instinct is to find an Apple Store.
Lerner writes, “They were open until eight. I felt a wave of relief. I asked (the hotel clerk) if I could make a call from the hotel phone – there was one on the desk – and she said dial 9. I picked up the receiver … and realized that I didn’t know Thomas’ number. … I was almost due at Thomas’; if I went to the store without calling him, I would be so late as to worry him, maybe frighten him.”
The narrator thus heads straight to his old mentor’s home, not intending to tell Thomas the truth about the phone, but instead to paint the evening’s conversation as a pre-interview, with the “real” one slated for the next morning.
The narrator, however, has also promised his school-resistant 10-year-old daughter, Evie, that he would FaceTime her at bedtime. Because Thomas only has a landline, the narrator knows he won’t be able to do that, either.
As he heads to one of Thomas’ phones to call his family, he passes a table covered with prepared food, including moldy strawberries, then finds in Thomas’ kitchen “several plastic gallon bottles of water on the floor, maybe to be moved to the basement. An ironing board was leaning against the oven. … On the counters were several half-full cups of water, coffee, maybe tea. I’d only ever seen the kitchen immaculate. The clock on the stove was flashing 12:00.”
Upon returning to Thomas, the narrator asks about dinner, and Thomas says, “Do you want something more to eat?”
Through these clues (and hints that Thomas sometimes believes the narrator to be his middle-aged son Max), the narrator and the reader know this much: Thomas is not OK. But he nonetheless holds court with his mentee for the evening, talking in intellectual circles that can frankly feel exhausting.
Yet this is likely the result of our era's collective impatience with the analog world. Though the narrator is surrounded by a host of curated art of different kinds in Thomas' house, he confesses, "I wanted – I needed – to check my texts, my email, to swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc., so as not only, not fully, to be where I was; since at least 2008, to be where I was was too much for me, or too little. … I wasn't merely distracted, I was offline, a state of exception. When I was walking up the hill into the past, my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screen less into a kind of super sensitivity, but now that I had arrived, … I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me: books, paintings, analog photographs, a vinyl record spinning somewhere in my mentor's house."
As many reviews have noted, "Transcription" is chock full of threes: The story is broken into three sections (each named for a hotel in the narrator's away-from-home location). A trinity of three men (the narrator, Thomas, and his son Max) are the novel's focus. And both the narrator and Max are married with troubled young daughters. Max is Thomas' only child – families of three abound.
The book's first section, "Hotel Providence," focuses on the narrator's interview visit with Thomas. The second section, "[Hotel Villa Real]," takes place after Thomas' death, at an event in Madrid that celebrates his work, life, and influence. The narrator has just delivered a talk at a museum, during which he admits that he hadn't recorded Thomas' last-ever interview because of the phone mishap.
Though the event's host, Rosa, following a dinner, admits to the narrator that Thomas would have loved the fact that his last-ever interview has an air of instability and uncertainty surrounding it, she pointedly scolds the narrator: "You more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last, I don't know, testament. A deepfake."
Though the narrator defends himself, the accusations land, and he learns that Max, whom the narrator knew in college, is reportedly "furious" – which sets us up for the last section, wherein the narrator visits Max in Los Angeles.
Not coincidentally, the final section reads like a transcript, with Max soliloquizing about his struggles with his young daughter Emmie's eating disorder; how he subconsciously tried to use his family's extreme permissiveness around junk food and sweets to provoke judgy Thomas during a visit; how loosening screen time and dinner rules eventually lured Emmie back to eating; and how, when Thomas was in the hospital with COVID, and it looked as though he would die, a kind nurse's attempt to connect Max became one of the most meaningful moments in their complicated relationship.
Though initially using Zoom – Max sees a glimpse of his dying father looking for him on a screen – the nurse says it's not working properly, and instead offers to hold a phone to Thomas' ear. Max says, "I can't do this, I was thinking, … but then I just was doing it, a rush of German and tears, no longer concerned about being overheard, things I never would have said if his image or his body were before me, or if anyone could see my face; I could only say them as a disembodied voice."
Technology can thus provide us opportunities to distance ourselves enough to say what's nearly impossible to say. But it also makes us feel resistant when we're prompted to make casual, everyday conversations with those around us.
That's the sticky wicket we find ourselves in these days – a love-hate codependent relationship with tech. It's one "Transcription" can't necessarily solve or relieve.
What it can do, however, as a work of fiction, is give us an accessible means to pursue these kind of conversations – preferably in person, not on Reddit.
