Raven + 1A slim, slippery volume that elegizes both Lerner’s aging artistic mentors—among them Keith Waldrop and the German author-filmmaker Alexander Kluge, who died in late March—as well as the vanished century that produced them ... His first book written as an elegy, a mode that comes with a thornier-than-usual crop of formal mandates ... Implausibly, Transcription pulls off all this and more. It is a lovely, desponding, idiosyncratic novel, anchored in a series of dialogues about artmaking, technology, and literal and figurative parenthood. Few books so aptly capture the weirdness of being flanked by two mutually incomprehensible generations—tech-illiterate elders on the one hand and digital natives on the other—and the mental gymnastics involved in liaising between them ... Never overly sappy or obvious ... Lerner manages to avoid heavy-handed commentary in favor of stranger pursuits.
