Ben Lerner

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), 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 written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

A Novel

Transcription

Nate

But waking does not end dream. I am sorry to be firm. This is an error in dream interpretation; This is an error we Westerners make. This is not the error of the Ongees, for instance—this is not how they dreamt at the Bay of Bengal. You must read my friend Vishvajit Pandya; 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. You asked me a beautiful question when you were a child: Were their dreams before cinema? And then: were they color dreams before color film? The last thing you do with such a question is answer it. 

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