Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New York Times

From 'the most talented writer of his generation' (The New York Times Magazine), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the air when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of Covid, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but summoning the intensity of a séance, Lerner’s writing shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Transcription is not a realistic, linear novel; it's a narrative meditation on a topic. Focusing on a central relationship between the narrator and an interview subject, Thomas, Lerner looks at what it means to communicate accurately. Three different scenes take place in which the narrator's initial encounter with Thomas, one in which he did not have a functional phone and thus did not record the interview, is called into question in terms of veracity both by characters in the story and through the metafiction of the content of the scenes. As a reflection on the idea of accuracy of transcription, this becomes a powerful set of ideas. Lerner spins these questions out into a number of profound places, questioning the means of communication (e.g., is a analog call the same thing as a Facetime session in terms of connection) and how much emotional weight they are bound to carry (very powerfully in looking at end-of-life calls during COVID). As a linear narrative, it's not very clear, which was confusing and off-putting to more plot-minded members of NUBClub. But it seemed clear to the rest of us that Lerner was quite deliberately using some winking repetitions and fourth-wall-breaking asides to make sure we knew this wasn't meant to be realistic. Those of us who took the novel more impressionistically were deeply moved by the quality of Lerner's writing and compelled by the challenging questions it asked. Lerner isn't making a final statement about truth or communication in the book; he's using three scenes to interrogate the limits of communication and the tenuousness of claims of truth in connection. And even if it wasn't a straightforward story, most of us thought it was well worth reading.