Ben Lerner’s Transcription (2026) tells the story of a conspicuously anonymous narrator, who goes to meet his mentor and former professor Thomas for an interview. The morning of the interview he drops his phone in water and cannot record their conversation. The status of this interview, as fiction or fact, is only the starting point for a narrative that weaves through the complexities of its characters’ lives, knitting them together in a way that suggests they were always already intertwined. The whole frame vibrates with deeply moving prose, touching on technology, eating disorders, love, and loss, linking all in a breathtaking web.
***
I finished Transcription on a Friday night in bed. I’d been working that day (in hospitality, these days a job I feel more and more lucky to have), and was working the next day, so I put it down to pick up my phone and text my girlfriend goodnight. Becoming more aware of my phone as I read the book still wasn’t stopping me from using it, and I still have it next to me when I sleep.
***
After work the next day, I was busy, but I told myself I had to reread it. It wasn’t urgent, but it was for the book club, a project some university friends and I had started. We were all passionate about it, it felt good to get young people together, reading and talking.
***
After work the next day, I sat down with the book. Transcription tells a story on the periphery of my generation’s experience: the weirdness of the introduction of phones. Lerner presents it like a Pandora’s Box, although not one that releases an evil. Phones are a lot like anything, they are, irreversibly. Even if they disappeared tomorrow, they would still ripple through our lives the way that Covid does (incidentally, another theme of the book).
Transcription captures the there-ness of phones; their physical presence, resembling a black box (my copy of the book has a shiny all-black cover), but also the way they structure our experience. Text messages flowing through the air, phone calls, reels. This is communication in a realm that exists, although you’d need to check your phone to know it. It’s interesting to imagine a world without this realm, and to me, it feels impossible. Like trying to imagine nothingness, it remains infected with something, a phone-like presence creeping over the horizon of this old world.
I grew up in a world with phones. I have a memory of being a child in London, hearing about how Blackberry was the future. The wheels were in motion then, although we ended up with a different dominant fruit. Phones are here now, you might be reading this on a phone.
Why read this at all? This is a question we take with us to every book, article, and post we read now. In my fantasy ante-telephonic past, no one asks themselves this question. It’s a question forced on us by the attention economy, though I find this term conceals the experience it’s supposed to describe.
Between the endlessly proliferating number of books, articles, posts, long-form and short-form video, podcasts, films, television shows, music, I struggle to find the time. I first saw Transcription being recommended in rave reviews on the publisher’s Instagram, alongside other rave reviews for a different book. The mind-numbing infinity of choice makes people leave the table, especially with more immediate problems to attend to. I’m lucky that I can bracket out work in a paragraph break; many aren’t so fortunate.
Lerner explores this paralysis through the daughters of the narrator and Max, his friend. A generation younger than me, they’re growing up glued to the screen and consuming its “garbage” (a term the narrator uses). Without a way to choose between all this stuff, why not go for something immediately satisfying? They opt for ASMR unboxing videos and Fruit Ninja.
Where fiction sits is something Lerner subtly questions throughout Transcription. Fiction doesn’t educate, provide new skills, or furnish fun facts, but it takes time and work to engage with. It is also hard to define: a kind of mental experience, subjective relation, a conscious activity. In this novel, fiction seems to extend beyond literature and art, into our most basic relationships with each other and the world. I risk anthropocentrism when I say it may be the basis of what makes us human. The value it provides isn’t quantifiable either, so in an economy of attention, it is likely to lose out.
According to these economies, you can calculate and exchange the value of art, as you can our time and our lives. It is in this aversion to abstraction and mathematisation that Lerner makes his case; by pulling us out of these economies (be they of attention or of money), he shows us the surplus of Being that spreadsheets can’t account for. Amidst the instrumentalisation of human experience in society, Transcription lets us see and feel what fiction does. It is worth more than one read.
_
Paperback Pints is a book club run by Cutting Takes. It is a book club by young people, for young people. Monthly events are held in London, in the collective aim of making meaningful literature fun and social. If you’re interested in coming to one of our events, you can join the WhatsApp group here for updates, and get a free ticket for our next event here.
Leave a comment