Book

Transcription

Ben Lerner

5/5

Formal and stylistic tour de force

Transcription draws you in slowly over the initial pages with its style, initially slightly awkward, increasing in smoothness as the narrative progresses, sometimes hitting a little deliberate obstacle which makes it rebound, ever more fluid. The lesson of this novel is that a contrived constructed narrative can be stylistically impressively handled. Like a river it speeds up to its destination gathering volume and momentum from everything is has absorbed along the way.

The topic is our present time, with all its neuroses, technological, sensory and emotional. It talks of familial and personal history, relationships with father figures and the past which constantly evolve and reconfigure themselves, and our struggles to make things work, to mend and heal, while honouring the past.

This novel reminds me of Rachel Cusks’ later work, the aim to find that difficult to reach blind turn where the writing separates from its author and soars away, like a hawk temporarily released to find a number of both commonplace and unlikely adventures and bring into view its different and uncanny perspective on the human world.

I cannot overstate how structurally and stylistically impressive this novel is. Lerner’s style is sparse but fluid, intellectual but unpretentious, and also elliptical and satisfyingly ambiguous when the narrative so demands, following a mental ebb and flow. Although very open and revealing of the characters’ failings and agonising emotions, it is also opaque, the final result a black box, alluded to by the bare cover, the red recording dot in the middle of an endless black button.

If transcription this is, it is a transcription of a reconstructed reality with all its messy lifelike ambiguities, an ironic label for a literary artifice, but also an attempt to record, truthfully, that which could not really be called a script, reality, present and past being so elusive and without any proven linearity. This is a smart challenge to the literary form, an attempt to widen it without losing momentum and meaning.

We start with the narrator, author’s alter ego, making a journey to his nonagenarian mentor, the domineering and intellectually inspiring Thomas, to record a final interview. He accidentally drops his phone in the sink at the hotel therefore deliberately sabotaging the very possibility of an ‘accurate’ transcription of this interview. The conversation with Thomas is riveting and confusing in equal measure, some form of dementia insinuating itself in Thomas’ habitual abstract discourse. The narrators’ respectful relationship with his mentor prevents him from challenging what is being said. He accepts the full blast of the influence of this slightly unhinged but also deeply thoughtful ambiguity, which sets the tone of unreliability for the rest of the novel. The dead corpse of the mobile phone gives permission for an enactment of a more archaic and archaeological exploration of reality.

At the end of the first chapter, it is unclear where the narrative is heading and we are not yet hooked, simply curious. Through the second chapter, antithesis to the first, we are brought into another kind of reality, a symposium in homage to Thomas who has now died. The ripping of the narrative from the US and its placement in Spain for the symposium functions as a reality check on the past-infested and past-infused home territory, where the storyline returns in the last chapter.

The narrator’s admission that his final interview with Thomas was not recorded gets an angry response from Thomas’ students and acolytes. Who is he to claim that his ‘transcription’ without a source can be truthful and reputable? Although Humanities scholars increasingly admit some inevitable and intrinsic subjectivity of opinion, they balk at unrecorded thoughts of others presented as attributable statements. But does recording them make them really that much more reliable, or even truthful? In this academic battlefield, who said what, where and how becomes more important than what the statement conveys, its nuances, suggestions and distance, also the fruitful confusion sometimes bordering insanity we experienced in the first chapter where Thomas said:

“But waking does not end a dream. I am sorry to be firm. This is an error in dream interpretation; this is an error we Westerners make. (…) I have told you this before. We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more. Like the eyes, all dreams are brown until they are shared.”

The mobile phone that dies at the beginning is one of the motors of the story contrasting with another excellent incorporation of the same device into a contemporary narrative, in Delphine de Vigan’s Je suis Romane Monnier. Where de Vigan focuses on the evolution of the human relationship with technology in everyday context, Lerner concentrates more on the subconscious symptoms of technological overuse and misuse. Both authors state that there is no easy remedy, and there certainly is no going back to analogue lives, although escapism in place and time is possible, enriching and salutary for both Lerner and de Vigan.

Thomas confuses the narrator with his son Max, and so do we throughout the novel, their wives and daughters also seem to merge, and so does the men’s relationship with Thomas, the father figure of the novel. When Thomas takes the narrator’ hands in the first chapter in an unprecedented warm gesture, the uncanny nature of this rare tactile moment is amplified by its repetition in the third chapter with Thomas holding the hands of his son Max in a similar manner. In this denial of individuality, the narrator and Max can be anybody else, simply stand-ins for Thomas’ momentary need. But the tactile connection is also a force of literary resolution.

In the exhilarating third chapter the narrator’s and Thomas’ voice overlap, merge and transform into Max, Thomas’ son, our new narrator. This chapter is finally perhaps the transcription from the title, but of Max’s words, although we don’t know who he is talking to, possibly the obliterated original narrator whose presence still resonates. Max’s seemingly recorded voice carries the heartbreaking story of his daughter Emmie, who refuses to eat, and that of his difficult relationship with his father.

After many different attempts to get Emmie interested in healthy or unhealthy food, to entice her or coerce her, the only thing that finally works is to let her watch her iPad while she eats, removing her from the watchful parental gaze. When Max realises that Emmie chooses to watch toy ‘unboxing’ videos while eating, the height of inane internet marketing, he immediately and aptly identifies it as a form of porn, administering controlled sensory input while screening reality. He is distraught that this is what it takes to get his daughter to eat, that the compromise has to be so immense and debasing.

The miracle of Emmie’s recovery gets compounded by the traumatic recounting of Max saying goodbye remotely to his father who is dying from covid in a hospital. The catch is that Thomas also miraculously recovers, leaving his son to wonder if he actually managed at last to communicate with his father in those most unlikely circumstances. But the two miracles are bittersweet, Max more than Emmie or Thomas feeling substantially altered by the experience, his voice the last witness. It is Max in the end who succeeds in recording Thomas, but we never hear what he has recorded.