Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner (HC)

Winner of the Orwell Prize

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

From “the most talented writer of his generation” (Giles Harvey, 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.

REVIEWS

“Above all, [Lerner] makes a case that reading―our experience of decoding, observing patterns, interpreting and misinterpreting language―is not merely a means of accessing a version of reality but an event in itself, and a profound encounter . . . There is a sense of the novel reveling in its own power of listening, its own antennae . . . The novel is our great, communal dream, the place that reveals what composite creatures we really are, what tangles of invention, what repositories for one another’s needs and fears. (‘I sound angry, but I think it is yours, the anger, reflected in me,’ a character says to another.) Can your phone do all that?”―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine

“Helping us recognize the atmosphere we’re immersed in has always been Lerner’s talent . . . [Transcription] lets us glimpse a deep, unappeasable desire: to have the dead, or the dead’s appointed representatives, forgive us, so that we may forgive them for having left us . . . Lerner’s novel comes as close as we can yet imagine to . . . registering a change that is everywhere around us.”―Nicholas Dames, The Atlantic

“A slim book―144 pages―and yet it cracks open some of the most colossal and enduring philosophical questions facing us today.”―MJ Franklin, The New York Times

PRODUCT DETAILS
Hardcover Edition
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978-0374618599
Pages: 144