Transcription
A Novel
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4.1 • 42 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the beautiful and resonant latest from Lerner (The Topeka School), a middle-aged man constructs an elaborate farewell to his mentor. In the first of three sections, the unnamed narrator travels to Providence, R.I., to interview 90-year-old artist Thomas for a magazine article. The narrator plans to record their conversation on his iPhone, which he accidentally breaks just before the appointment. Unable to admit the problem to Thomas, he proceeds with the interview, and Thomas embarks on his characteristically stunning soliloquies on art, light, and sound ("There is always music playing that we cannot hear.... We are deaf to the bats singing in ultrasound, or the elephants conversing in their infrasound.... The air is alive with messages"). In the second section, set after Thomas's death, the narrator travels to Madrid for a symposium on Thomas's work, where he's questioned after saying that he had drawn some of the now published interview with Thomas from memory. The novel concludes with a dialogue between the narrator and Thomas's son, Max. The pair, who have been friends since college, grapple with their complex relationships with Thomas ("Maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger," Max tells the narrator), and new mysteries arise over the course of their conversation. Lerner's lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist's influence echoes through time. It's a knockout.
Customer Reviews
Worth the Wait
This man has quite an original voice and, if you stick with it, he will take you on quite a beautiful, searching journey.