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.
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.
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.
