Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read “The Renovation,” by Kenan Orhan. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on “Kin,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Hounding.”)
There is a funny visual irony to our smartphones — they’re tiny objects and yet, for many of us, they contain a seemingly endless well of tools, information and communications that dictate our lives. It’s impressive how something so small can hold so much.
The same can be said of Ben Lerner’s new novel, “Transcription.” It’s a slim book — 130 pages — and yet it cracks open some of the most colossal and enduring philosophical questions facing us today.
The novel is told in three parts. We open with an unnamed narrator going to interview his mentor, Thomas — an acclaimed artist in his 90s who also happens to be the father of one of the narrator’s friends, Max — for a magazine. Before the interview, however, the narrator’s phone, which he was planning to use to record the conversation, falls in the sink and breaks. Rather than reschedule, he goes to Thomas’s home and proceeds with the interview anyway, taking no notes and only pretending to record him.
The second section flashes to the future. Thomas has died, and the article that our narrator wrote has become enshrined as the final interview with the iconic artist. At a symposium in Madrid, the narrator confesses that his interview with Thomas as it appeared was reconstructed, a revelation that dismays the other guests and infuriates Max. Then we flash again. In the final section, Thomas talks to Max, who discusses his own complicated relationship with Thomas and technology, including how the internet and other digital tools impacted his family during several crises.
Through these scenes, “Transcription” asks a series of questions: How does technology mediate our lives? How does it bring us together or pull us apart? Is there a difference between what’s real and what’s true?
In May, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “Transcription,” by Ben Lerner. We’ll be chatting about it on the Book Review podcast that airs on May 29, and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by May 18 and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get you started.
Our critic Alexandra Jacobs’s review of “Transcription”: “Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete’s command of different, overlapping genres, is winning.” Read the full review here.
Parul Sehgal’s essay in The New York Times Magazine about “Transcription” and Ben Lerner’s preoccupation with technology and the novel as a form: “Lerner has always been attentive to how technology mediates communication; ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ contains one of the first convincing renditions of characters chatting online, complete with the lags and awkwardness. I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. ‘Transcription’ is a chronicle of that confusion.” Read the full essay here.
The New Yorker’s interview with Ben Lerner, where he discusses technology and “Transcription”: “There wasn’t a book in me that was merely about showing how our attention is degraded by our phones. The book became writable when I thought of its project as partly about restoring our wonder before the weird fact of the disembodied voice that is made possible by different media, like voice mail and radio.” Read the full interview here.
We can’t wait to discuss the novel with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
