Transcription by Ben Lerner Review

If you ever see a book marketing itself with the phrase “a meditation on…” then drop that book immediately because it will almost certainly be a total waste of your time. Unfortunately for me I didn’t notice that the copy on the inside jacket called this book “a brilliant meditation on…” until after I’d read the book but my theory checks out as Transcription by Ben Lerner is not good.

The book is divided into three sections: in the first, a writer visits his elderly mentor for what will probably be the mentor’s final interview. Before beginning, the writer drops his phone - which he was going to use to record their interview - into a sink, breaking it, and instead of cancelling the interview or explaining himself, he decides to proceed with the interview, pretending his phone still works, and then afterwards reconstructs from memory his mentor’s words.

The second section reveals that others have found out that the writer falsified quotes from his interview with the mentor and the people who liked him are upset with the writer for this. The third and final section is the mentor’s son talking to the writer about, mainly, his daughter’s eating disorder, and partially about his relationship with his father.

And this is why I think books describing themselves as “meditations” are bullshit as there’s nothing else to say about them. Transcription doesn’t know what it’s about. It says something about how dependent we are now on phones, which is an absolutely banal point. Yes, it’s bad that everyone’s addicted to their phones, but there’s a moment in the third section where a phone provides the most moving scene in the book so phones are also… goooood? (albeit this was a basic phone and not the mini computers that the majority of us use - so basic phones = good, smartphones = bad?)

I get the general concept of what Lerner’s attempting about the fragility of memory, unreliable narrators, and how everyone’s perceptions are different. We don’t know what’s real about any of the sections, whether the writer in the first section is making it all up based on his conversation with his mentor’s son in the third section, or vice versa, because elements of both stories appear in both sections. The book cover (to this edition anyway) looks like a recording device and different people reading this book will come away with different perceptions of what they’ve read - meta! I get that Lerner’s vaguely trying to say something about the nature of reality, what’s real and what’s in our heads are two different things, etc.

I just don’t find what he’s doing in this book at all convincing, clear or enlightening. Parts of the book are frustratingly contrived - why is the writer in the first section so unprepared for an interview, bringing only his phone to record, and so unable to articulate his mistake to his mentor, or even attempt postponing the interview until the next day?? Other parts feel annoyingly unclear on when they’re happening - are the sections happening in sequence? - with the third section in particular feeling meandering and largely pointless.

Much of the story is underdeveloped - although I thought it was kinda funny that we never even find out what the mentor did for a living, as in what was he mentoring people on? - so that we never understand the stakes of what the writer did or why any of it matters. Some people thought poorly of him for bungling his account of his mentor’s final words - so what?

There is a moving scene in the third section when the son thinks his father’s dying of Covid and tells him what he thinks in one garbled, but realistic, speech, and the aftermath of that moment. And, while feeling disjointed, it was mildly interesting to read about the daughter’s eating disorder (social media helped with that - nuance! Gawd amighty).

I didn’t enjoy reading most of Transcription. I don’t think Ben Lerner is a good storyteller or writer, or an especially good artist. What I believe he was trying to convey - a clumsy and weak commentary on technology’s ubiquity in modern life, and the complexities of its benefit/detriment to society, as well as something on the use of language - was shallow and ineffectively portrayed in an unmemorable and often baffling narrative.

So of course it won a literary award - you know, those things that some judges, who have such poor literary taste, award writers who use AI (like Jamir Nazir’s story "The Serpent in the Grove" for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize). I recommend that potential readers meditate on something other than Transcription.