Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Granta . 144 pages £14.99. ISBN: 978-1803513805
Reviewed by Tony Roberts
I don’t have a smartphone. I realise that in effect that means I am cutting
myself off from the cultural moment. After reading Ben Lerner’s intriguing new
novella, however, I feel I just might have dodged a bullet. Transcription
explores the distances created in living and in relationships by technology. It
concerns itself with how some devices (‘technologies of capture’) disrupt our
sense of reality, just as time bedevils memory.
Ben Lerner is a much admired American writer, originally from Kansas and
currently teaching at Brooklyn College. He is the author of three other novels
to date: Leaving the Atocha Station, 10.04 and The Topeka
School. His poetry is also in demand and seen widely.
Lerner’s novel is told in three scenes. The first is set in Providence, Rhode
Island, the second in Madrid, and the third in LA. It is an unnerving experience
being in the company of his obsessive narrator, whose voice we hear in the first
two scenes and occasionally in the last. He is an unnamed writer (a version of
the author), returning to his college town (the Ivy League’s Brown University)
to record and write an interview with a German professor, Thomas, for whom he
was once an undergraduate research assistant and mentee. He is forty-five years
old, his distinguished professor, an expert on art and technology — one thinks
of the Frankfurt school — is ninety. Once Thomas’s ‘art therapy’ had helped save
him.
The assignment is compromised before the meeting, early in the story, when the
writer drops his smartphone and has to proceed to his appointment with the
professor without a means of recording the interview. For reasons not
entirely clear, the effect on him is disastrous, but for the reader not totally
surprising. The narrator has an air of the dysfunctional about him. He is in and
out of time. In the first paragraph we learn he is ‘facing the past’ in sitting
against the train’s direction of travel. He is wearing a mask in these Covid
times and is already hampered by the fear that
his recording might fail in some way. Also nagging at him is his concern
for his young daughter, Eva, who has a school phobia about which he and his
wife, Mia, are panicked. On the train he falls into a Parisian dream where he is
prevented from reaching Eva.
This is a man with a desperate need to be in touch. The phone locates him in
time and place. He is so dependent on it that he listens to walking directions
to places he already knows. His unprovidential Hotel Providential stands on a
grim street. The writer is hesitant about phoning his professor to announce his
arrival and wonders why the man’s ‘disembodied voice’ should be more
intimidating than the man in person. And then in his room his phone slips into
the sink, cracking the screen. What might be a normal, annoying accident here
becomes threatening (‘The home-screen image of Eva and Mia and Luna [their
rescued dog] was growing abstract around the edges.’)
The narrator is desperate to obtain a replacement (‘I wasn’t merely distracted,
I was offline, a state of exception’). Was his accident an unconscious attempt
to sabotage the interview, as an analyst friend of his might have suggested. The
phone is now a ‘corpse’. Without it: ‘I was experiencing a withdrawal
indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones
stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or
receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work
email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual
experience of presence… I was also walking into my past, because this was a
landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the
past would I be deviceless.’
Memory is, not for the last time in the novella, described as ‘time travel’, a
situation endured before the narrator can have ‘rejoined the world’. And while
time travelling in his old college town, he bumps into a friend and slips into a
memory of his days there, when his relationship with Mia had been more turbulent
and had led to his breakdown, to the end of his ‘childhood’.
All this is well done, the atmosphere of dislocation convincingly established.
When the narrator arrives for his interview with Thomas, he wants, inexplicably,
to avoid confessing that his recording equipment is broken, and hopes to pass
the evening’s meeting off as a dry run.
The second section of the novel takes place at a conference in Madrid, where the
narrator has given a lecture on Thomas’s ideas. Rosa, a curator at the Reina
Sofia Museum, is a longtime acolyte of the now-deceased Thomas, who encouraged
her early work on reversal in printmaking. With the assistance of the narrator,
she has gathered a mixed media display of his art.
Again we find our writer, who continues to live in his Google and
FaceTime screen world, surprised by a turn in events. The speech he just gave as
an encomium to Thomas has been received as a confession. An increasingly irate
Rosa tells him his recorded last interview with Thomas had been a ‘deepfake’:
‘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.’ The narrator is
flabbergasted by the accusation and defends himself. Later he begins to wonder.
The third scene of Transcription has him in LA, listening to Thomas’s
lawyer son Max, his old college friend. Max had been furious at his
‘confession’, according to Rosa. Is the visit to explain himself? The scene
begins abruptly (Could it be a transcription of a recording by the narrator?).
Max’s life and experience partly replicate that of the narrator’s, albeit with
different results. Both were subject to youthful depression. Both have daughters
with phobias. Max’s daughter Emmie’s is with eating. While the narrator reveres
Thomas, Max has issues with his father. And yet he, unlike his friend, actually
does record his father, albeit almost by accident.
To the son, his emotionally distant father ‘would meet anything personal with
some demonstration of arcane knowledge or lyrical improvisation’, a tendency we
have already witnessed and will again, with his response to his granddaughter’s
use of screen time (which ironically proves therapeutic). To the son, this
pedantry is Thomas’s defence mechanism against reality.
Max only turns to his father when the latter is near death from Covid,
witnessing agonising moments on screen and by phone. Though he confronts his
father with his lack of affection, he feels that imminent death has ‘opened a
channel between them’. In fact Thomas does not die then —all this takes place
after the narrator’s interview— and Max flies to visit the old man. He
experiences the same kind of double-reality the narrator had when traveling to
Thomas —the lived one and the screen one, the sense of time travel back to
college days.
Recounting this to the narrator, he draws an analogy between his emotional state
and an iPhone disturbance. It culminates in his confession that, ‘my grasp on
reality was tentative, an extreme form of the effect his presence always had on
me, a nightmarish form of what others so loved about him — how he seemed from
the future and the past simultaneously, a gentleman time traveler, how he
reenchanted the air around us, made other worlds seem possible.’ Max explains
that his recording of his father is his attempt to preserve a connection to
reality, against which he can test his experience. There is an irony, however.
The novella offers more than I suggest in the above. For instance, I’ve ony
touched on the subplots. More importantly, I also leave Thomas himself and the
accounts of the interviews—those held with the writer and his lawyer-son —to the
reader. I recommend Transcription as a fascinating, puzzling perspective
on a question of our times.