“You call this fiction, but it is more.”
“I felt eight and eighteen and forty-five all at once, my grasp on reality was tentative, an extreme form of the effect his presence always had on me, a nightmarish form of what others so loved about him – how he seemed from the future and the past simultaneously, a gentleman time traveler…”
Ben Lerner’s Transcription (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2026)is, without a doubt, the most “Bookery” book I’ve read in my preparation of the longlist announcement. It’s a slim volume of scholarship, technology, madness, memory, fathers & sons, and rivalries & jealousies. It dances across timelines, both for the reader and for narrator (who shimmers into the author on occasion – “I call her Eva in this book” and “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged.”)
The novel opens with the narrator at a hotel in Providence, Rhode Island where he is preparing to interview Thomas, his 90-year-old college mentor and father of a college classmates. He intended to record the conversation on his phone, put he dropped the phone in the sink prior to going. As such, there was no recording, only what the narrator recalled. Thomas is confused, blending the narrator with his own son, Max. Max holds the final section, detailing moments with his father wherein you realize Thomas has long been blending Max into the narrator and the narrator into Max. It is clear that both men loved Thomas, wanted his approval, and were jealous of the other.
The cover, a golden iPhone made to look like a relic of days long past, is perfect despite my initial comparison to Universality’s gold bar.
Despite this not being my favorite type of novel, I enjoyed Lerner’s prose and that shimmery break from reality that glitches throughout. It’s a smart little novel. I won’t be surprised not only if it’s longlisted, but shortlisted.
A Girl Named Tommi 