Review: 'Transcription: A Novel' by Ben Lerner
Pub. Date: 07/04/2026
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.
Transcription centres on an unnamed narrator who is present throughout the three connected stories/parts of the novel. In the first he is on his way to interview an old mentor, Thomas, when he drops his phone in the hotel sink and is now without a way of recording the interview. When he visits Thomas, he is unable to tell him about this and their conversation is a meandering ramble through memories that may or may not be real, as Thomas seems to be slipping away while the narrator obsesses about his useless phone. In the second part, we see the narrator present at a conference in honour of the now-deceased Thomas where he reveals his little phone mishap, which casts his interview, which was the last one Thomas ever did in a whole new light for the other attendees. How reliable is this interview, if there was no transcription or recording of it? The last part is our narrator in conversation with Max, Thomas' son and the narrator's college friend. Max's relationship with his father is complex, but so is his relationship with his daughter, who might have ARFID, and his relationship with technology. There are clear themes which surface throughout these three parts, namely that of fatherhood, the constructed nature of relationship and memory, and technology as a boon and a manipulator. All of this does come together to craft both a suspenseful story and an interesting meditation on these themes, but parts of it did also leave me cold.
I've not read anything by Ben Lerner before but I can see why people enjoy his writing. Transcription is at once deeply rooted in the now and yet also vague. We have references to Covid-19 and Taylor Swift, but also allusions to all kinds of historical events and personages that you'll have to Google. I did not end up Googling these, as I was reading, so perhaps I missed out on something that way. With this balancing act, Lerner does create a certain kind of tension which is enjoyable and aids in the somewhat ghostly atmosphere of the whole book. I did have to think of this "ghost in the machine" idea, especially as technology is so central to how this novel is marketed and constructed. Lerner weaves a narrative that is at once incredibly straightforward but also retains ambiguity, the feeling that there is more there but that we can't quite access it anymore. On a sentence-level his writing is also excellent. I did wonder if that "more" was actually there, though, or if the sense of it is created by non-linearity, an unnamed narrator, and allusions. I found Transcription very intriguing and I was definitely sucked into its different parts. I also appreciated how the parts came together, interwove with one another and yet left enough blank space that I could think and speculate. And yet I couldn't escape the feeling that its central message is unclear. Perhaps this is because of how I read it, maybe I didn't go with the flow enough or should have looked up those references. I am definitely curious to read more by Lerner, even if Transcription didn't entirely do what I thought it might.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
While Transcription didn't mystify me in the way I hoped for, I was intrigued by it. If themes of fatherhood, reliability, and technology intrigue you, then definitely give this one a go!
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