Ben Lerner’s gorgeously crafted novel explores the human world of wrong turns

FICTION
Transcription
Ben Lerner
Granta. $29.95

In his poem Metric Figure, William Carlos Williams writes, “There is a bird in the poplars! / It is the sun!” and in this manner, line by line, retrospectively alters how the reader pictures the poem’s images, so that we find ourselves remaking each “event” with each new piece of poetic information.

Ben Lerner’s gorgeously crafted short novel Transcription achieves this retrospective reframing on a novelistic scale. Each of the three parts shifts our understanding of what has gone before, of the events, and of image and reality within the novel.

At the novel’s opening, the unnamed writer/narrator visits his old university town to write a magazine feature on Thomas, his now 90-year-old mentor; Thomas refers to it as an “exit interview”.

But transcription is impossible: the writer’s phone has fallen into the bathroom sink in his room at the Hotel Providence – “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged” – leaving him with no communications, no map, no watch, no camera, no sound recording device and no way of keeping promises to Thomas and to the writer’s daughter, whose school refusal concerns him.

His immediate duties cannot be fulfilled, nor can he suppress more general contemporary impulses: don’t pull the phone out again, or feel for it, or even think about it. This is the wired world he’s in, that most of us occupy. It’s an anxious place, this world. You might, at this point in the book, be tapping your own pockets: what if there’s a message from a partner or child or parent or boss or colleague or tradesperson or an old friend you haven’t seen for a decade who chooses this exact moment to reestablish contact? What if it’s a missed call from someone who might be unwell, or a change of arrangements or a hotel cancellation or a world event or an invitation to a celebration which clashes with the only other event you’ve accepted for in June? What if that vibration is a notification from an app that you sometimes use? What if there’s no notification because you possibly left the thing in Flight Mode?

The writer gets into such anxiety about his drowned phone that he can’t even tell Thomas what has happened – that he has no means to record their conversation. Thomas has no smartphone, is dogmatically dismissive of 24/7 connectivity. The writer suggests a pre-interview chat, to outline subjects for the main conversation the following day.

“Yes, but you are recording,” [Thomas] asked. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves, and it grows unnatural.[...]”

[D]id he somehow know, with his famous powers of observation, that I’d arrived without the necessary tools? Or did he mean something figurative by “recording”?

Thomas speaks in perfect sentences, with depth and insight, touching on a dozen subject areas, in his European cultured manner. Addressing the nature of our relationship with the phone, he says, “The dream is opposed to your phone, where no dead or distances are able to appear.”

The writer and Thomas have been so close that at times, Thomas confuses him with his son Max. Recalling eye colours amidst sometimes partial memories, Thomas tells the writer, “The blue of your – of Virginie, Max’s mother, remains available.”

The novel is framed by the idea of transcription, or of its impossibility. But of course – due to the writer’s phone incident, it is impossible that this conversation could have been preserved. If the writer hasn’t managed to record Thomas, what is the reader to make of conversation recorded in these pages?

Lerner faces this question directly in the novel’s second section, set in Madrid. The writer’s “exit interview” has been published, and he has told the story of his submerged phone to Thomas’s community of academics. The story doesn’t go down well. Rosa, a curator at the Reina Sofia gallery and another of Thomas’s proteges, accuses: “You, well, 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.” She said the last word in English.

The conversational tone of this section feels more natural, but by now all dialogue is called into doubt in the manner with which the writer ends the first chapter: “You call this fiction, but it is more.” There are suggestions throughout that blur the line between fiction and autofiction.

Daily life purposively displaces the story of the writer’s interview from the novel’s centre: his thoughts about his partner and daughter, conversations with his family from hotels, and his relationship to Max, Thomas’s son. The writer and Max had been friendly when they were students, and although they have drifted, their lives mirror each other’s. Where the writer’s daughter – “I call her Eva in this book” – has been refusing school, Max’s daughter Emmie, according to Thomas, “has some trouble with eating.”

As the novel proceeds, the two men in their forties attempt to understand and map their relationships with their mentor and father: Thomas is brilliant and distant, insightful and short-sighted. In Thomas’s orbit, the writer is deferential and Max confrontational.

But the writer’s and Max’s lives are also those of fathers and families. Lerner crafts an exquisite transition into these more pressingly urgent actualities, the story of each daughter kindling empathy beyond the space of memory and transcription. In the immediacy of familial frames, we’re brought into the human world of wrong turns, layers of complication, faulty navigation, guesswork and luck.

Dr Bernard Cohen is an award-winning novelist and director of The Writing Workshop.

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