As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it’s about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life ... A familiar story about the dynamic between an accomplished but distant father and the son who cannot quite reach him ... More of an exercise than a sporting event, like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball, the — yep! — triangle with its oracular messages bobbing within.
There is so much silence in this novel, so much air ... A novel speaks, yes, but it can also listen ... I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. Transcription is a chronicle of that confusion ... Struggling to describe the shape of this book just now, I reached for a pair of tights on the floor, dreadfully torn and twisted. That is the experience of this book, I thought, poking at the ladders; you fall straight through the story, just like its characters.
Remarkable ... The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices ... Feels like a step toward drama. It is by far his shortest novel—a short novel by anyone’s standards—and much of it is dialogue ... From book to book, his writing crackles with new insights, images, motifs—or are they old? Glass flowers, Beethoven’s stick, your mother’s voice. They all come back around, and the novel is well suited to represent these ruptures in time, to bear the pressures of the past.
The irony of Lerner’s title comes brightly into focus: since there was no recording, there can be no transcription. What we are reading, instead, is the narrator’s reconstruction, a volatile compound of the fictive and the real ... Words, Lerner shows, lead double lives, including the one he has taken for his title ... The novel, Lerner’s shortest to date, is a chamber piece, more compressed and crystallized than any of its predecessors ... Thanks to Lerner’s mastery of the novel—the most capacious recording technology invented so far—we come to understand Emmie’s disorder as the latest variation on an age-old theme ... For Lerner, language is both a symbol and the medium of human reciprocity, a long collective poem we each assume is ours alone.
A 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.
The book, divided into three encounters—conversations, really—has an unusually stark quality that gives it the feel of a parable ... Lerner’s dual talents give him a unique purchase ... Lerner’s novel comes as close as we can yet imagine to honoring their delicate way of registering a change that is everywhere around us—and that is making nonsense of the difference between inside us and outside us.
I found all the stuff about phones and screen time in Transcription tedious and unoriginal, but I see its broader appeal ... That material seems to me the sugar-coating around a more bitter pill: a novel about mortality with strong suggestions of suicidal tendencies, themes that are difficult to address directly, subjects that wither with too much explanation or direct confession ... The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most troubles his characters, the sense that they are disposable and could easily be replaced ... The method remains fertile for Lerner, his poetry and novels recording devices more sensitive than the glass flowers for projecting ourselves into the future – us, or people a lot like us.
These ideas risk becoming arid, and there are certainly times when Mr. Lerner overexplains them. But the concept of instability is also reflected in the texture of the writing, which blends the narrator’s version of events with his dreams and even, at one point, suggests that he is aware he is in a novel. Even more vitally, Mr. Lerner is very funny. When attached to a character, indeterminacy manifests itself as confusion, and the novel mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-antihero ... There is also sadness in Transcription, as Mr. Lerner’s method is to flicker between humor and heartbreak ... Uncertainty is the main enticement of this small, mercurial book. The only clear morals of Transcription have to do with its insistence on mystery, and on art that teases the mind and refreshes the senses.
A book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner’s refined, allusive fiction. It’s also a compelling exploration of how this hyper-literate sensibility, its intense interest in overlap and resonance, can lead us astray ... Lerner has written about how twenty-first century technology mediates our existence, and there’s no novelist better at it: To read his descriptions of characters’ interactions online is both to recognize one’s own experience and to see new aspects of it ... One of the unsettling things about Transcription is how its characters repeatedly draw conclusions that other parts of the book seem to undermine. We are not, it suggests, very good at understanding our place in history.
I love to get into the cushioned golf cart of Lerner’s consciousness and accompany him on one of his careful rides, where he takes care of both of us and sharpens my consciousness ... The grain of his brain stories is so fine and, to this brain, those stories are as universal as any others ... It would be miserly and clumsy to ask Lerner to go for historical sweep or class war. But his narrator could do more inside the act of noticing the privilege of parents stocking their house with candy for the suffering child with her iPad, or the father figure choosing the luxury of his own death.
Remarkable ... The conversations in the novel are digressive but unusually open, giving the book a theatrical feel. Lerner doubles down on this theatricality thematically too, threading references to performance and failure throughout until the plot literalizes them ... Transcription never stops asking whether technology corrodes authentic experience. But this ultimately leaves us with a different question: whether it can also carry what we most want to pass on ... Lerner seems to suggest something similar: that each act of transmission is also an act of creation — and that each generation may have the chance to be better than the one that came before.
Takes an unfamiliar shape that heightened my experience of fiction itself. The book is slim, curious, at once crystalline and slippery ... Transcription is a work of art for a new age of mechanical reproduction, a meditation on imperfect facsimile ... At once dense and delicate, like a natural pearl that Lerner’s proffering or a piece of marzipan he’s happy to share ... I never feel, when I read Lerner, that his tricksy geometries eclipse emotion, sincerity, vulnerability ... Yes, there are the ducks and rabbits Lerner pulls from his hat, but a tender antenna is just as much a requisite for his fiction.
Lerner’s novels belong to various other literary traditions: conceptual novels, introspective novels of ideas, novels of futurity, novels about masculinity, the anti-hero novel, to name a few. Transcription has elements of each of these genres, but it is perhaps primarily a metafictional experiment—a meditation on fiction itself ... Like all of Kafka’s fiction, Lerner’s Transcription is seductively frustrating ... His most experimental and unsettling book yet ... This makes for delicious reading, but is that enough?
Transcription feels like a retreat into a diminished scale—Lerner downsized for the streaming age. The themes are there ... This is a Ben Lerner novel, no doubt about it. Yet. None of it hits the same ... There are no bad sentences in this novel. I want to be clear about that. The form is very good ... The ending section is brilliant, a moving and wonderful soliloquy about trying to contend with the wreckage of one’s own childhood while also trying to keep one’s own child alive. Yet, while reading Transcription, I had this eerie feeling of having heard this song before at greater volume. It seems unfair to rag on a book filled with beautiful sentences and true observations about how we live now, I know. But the cold fact is that many of the true observations about recording technology and the slipperiness of memory and the past in the first two parts of Transcription feel trite at this late date.
Transcription is a beautiful meditation on cognitive capacity and the power of fiction. It is one of the rare pieces of Covid fiction that does not ignore, glamorize, or sentimentalize the pandemic ... A meandering novel like this can never quite end in the same way a highly plotted novel can. But such a silvery, literary work offers something else: the kind of imaginative possibility that only a work of fiction set half in the dream world can summon. In the Lerner canon, it may be a gateway rather than a watershed—but it's one of the most compelling contemporary books I've read this year.
I would like to tread softly, because Transcription is in part an homage to someone Lerner was close with, the poet and translator Keith Waldrop, who died in 2023 ... The best thing is perhaps to treat it as fiction; and as fiction it feels interminable ... Perhaps Lerner’s love of poetry is at fault. Poetry can evoke and outline, weave an arabesque and then vamoose; a novel demands animating tension, and resolution rather than just an ending.
In Transcription, Lerner’s subtle play of motifs—ingestion, mediation, repetition, fabrication—has never been sharper, his fictional architecture wrought finely like a twinkling Blaschka flower ... By the book’s end, with the choral subjects of Max, Thomas, and Adam, of fathers and sons, what glows brightest is the parental, and especially fatherly, love ... Lerner manages to describe beyond sentimentality—is presented to the reader as an end: of meaning, of literature, of the purified thing beyond the thing.
Both dense and nimble ... Transcription might sound like solely an intellectual exercise, but it’s an immensely fun and engaging book to read ... Can be read quickly but takes time to settle and persists in the mind. It’s a thrilling hall of mirrors in which to get lost but I’m unsure its insights are as impressive as its acrobatics.
Poignant ... A story of crossed wires, disconnection and anxious attachments – to fathers, father figures and digital comfort blankets ... Not so long ago, the male protagonist of a literary novel might have channelled his midlife ennui into an affair with a younger woman, and ruminated on how their intimacy made him feel vis-a-vis the passage of time. Today, instead, he can look up a love-rival from his college days on Facebook – as Lerner’s narrator does here – and observe that, 20 years on, the guy looks essentially the same but has grown slightly fatter. Small wins, but they all count.
Formally inventive and genre-dissolving ... The strongest of Lerner’s fiction to date ... A novel that centers language ... Lerner’s deceivingly straightforward prose is both accessible and vividly attuned to sensory detail, and his sharp ear for spoken language shines across the novel ... Lerner’s poetic talent is on full display.
With Transcription, Lerner is rising to the challenge of novelizing what has become emblematic of millennial life ... Language and the self-concept are continual focuses of all past Lerner novels. Each new book chooses a fresh perspective from which to observe, but the themes are as familiar as ever: we are facing the past in order to observe the present ... Perhaps the main aim of any Lerner novel is to observe the poet in the wild, interacting with and coming to understand the push and pull of language. Each of the author’s novels is a portrait of an artist within the world, engaging with it, trying to live a life in spite of and toward language.
Brilliant ... Transcription is unusual, even in 'literary fiction', as a work made self-consciously of gaps and loose ends. About many central matters, it simply won’t tell us. Most books shape mysteries in order to solve them; this refuses ... Not so much plotted as woven. Motifs recur, doubling, tripling, in variations. Lerner’s speakers all have a fluency in their prose that is reassuringly constant, a flowing articulacy and dramatic rhythm ... Quite elegant in anatomising the feelings, in the hand and head and eyesight, of alternating presences and absences of the newer technologies to which we’ve grown accustomed.
Gorgeously crafted ... Each of the three parts shifts our understanding of what has gone before, of the events, and of image and reality within the novel ... Exquisite.
Lerner’s style is distinctive and wonderful. You know it more by its effects than any features at which you would point. It doesn’t rely on gimmicks or showy tics; it has a momentum, a languid roll ... Transcription contains many beautiful exchanges, or moments within exchanges – because this novel is comprised of exchanges that struggle to find an end.
Terrific ... The prose of Lerner’s fourth novel is perhaps a little looser than that of its predecessors ... What comes in its place is a lovely lucidity, exquisitely sensitive to contraries, alert to the potential absurdity in minute observation, but too refined, too acute, ever to be accused of it.
A novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic ... His layered, associative sentences skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect ... Its bracing intelligence is at its most gripping when it addresses a seemingly simple issue.
'Transcription' suggests the faithful rendering of sound into text. But it also suggests the transfer of experience from one medium to another, with all the distortions and loss of resolution that entails. Memory is a transcription. So is fiction ... Everything that is preserved is also altered ... The novel is aware of its own procedures, occasionally to the point of announcing them ... The risk is that the novel becomes a demonstration rather than a discovery, an illustration of a thesis rather than an exploration ... But this objection, while not trivial, does not stick. What rescues the book is its attention to the ordinary ... Whether one finds this convincing will depend on one's tolerance for Lerner's manner.
It’s confusing, writing about Transcription. Its characters are confused, and so is its time. It feels almost impossible to describe the density of memory, perception, and voice that carries the novel; especially impossible to describe it while also giving equal weight—and one must!—to its completely easygoing beauty, the smoothness of its wash, the thrill of its sentences coming to inform—even invent, or originate—your own senses as you read it ... Ben Lerner is always asking and never answering the question: Is this language you’re reading a good example? ... Teaches us that to read a Ben Lerner fiction is to become entwined in its vision ... Lands most deeply in Lerner’s neither dramatized nor diminished inclusion of vocabulary that constitutes the shared dream of our present: scrolling or pretending not to scroll and masking or thinking about masking but not feeling like it.
A comparatively spare, restrained effort ... Lerner stresses that memory is always subject to glitches and in many ways out of our control. His prose, meanwhile, is highly determined, full of neat conceptual patterns and always supplying the means for its own interpretation ... There is enough strangeness and unpredictability baked into the form that it bears and rewards rereading. Each time something new makes sense and something else unravels.
A funny and witty short fiction ... Lerner’s subtle cross-story allusions, repeated images, doubling names, and lying women are devices capable of uniting a non-narrative poem—and that are much overpraised ... These features can be found in the substantial fiction of another poet who became a novelist—Faulkner. But fancy fretwork is not why we read Faulkner, and the compositional intricacy that may help carry a book of 130 pages, such as Lerner’s, is not a method that will restore the supposed lost force of fiction ... Transcription is a minor response to major mastery—a kind of metafictional masochism if you need psychology.
What Ben Lerner is really offering is a space that cannot be pinned down, one that represents an ever-moving confluence of ideas and images and personalities that somehow make a world, make a life. For such a brief book, this is as much and, frankly, more than any reader can ask for. Transcription is complex, narratively dense — and for this reader, it is intriguing rather than off-putting. Because every time a reader thinks they’re beginning to follow the thread of an idea, that thread is twisted in a new direction, so that the only thing that can really be known is a kind of flavor or texture to the prose ... An utterly unique reading experience.
A lyrical novel of loss ... Transcription works by exploring the specific and allowing it to stand in for the general ... A new way of thinking about how we write meaning down or across or over.
A tightly controlled meditation on some consequential subjects ... More a piece of closely observed reportage than a conventionally plotted novel, but through the exchanges of its astute characters it allows us to reflect on parental relationships, formal and informal, and whether the privilege we accord recorded recollections is truly deserved.
Lerner conjures a remarkable meditation on memory, communication and what the narrator at one point calls 'technologies of capture' ... One of Transcription’s great virtues is that it manages to explore digital technology’s deranging effects on us without devolving into mere condemnation ... Transcription is a formidable addition to this already stellar body of work.
Musings on what screens and round-the-clock connectivity are doing to us humans return again and again in the novel ... Throughout Transcription, there are asides on managing one’s descent into death and on the nature of fiction itself, a topic that is no surprise from a writer who once said that he was 'thinking about what happens to language when it moves from outside the frame of a fiction into the frame of a fiction.'
A compact and profound meditation on the nature of memory, mentorship and the making of fiction in the digital age ... Attains moments of energy transference between novel and reader ... Haunting and beautiful.
Beautiful and resonant ... 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.
This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along. A tart meditation on narrative and integrity.
