Book of the Week: TRANSCRIPTION by Ben Lerner
Ben Lerner’s new novel considers the transmission of ideas and influence by various means, from the organic mechanisms of culture — family, admiration, language — to the various technologies of capture and broadcast — from personal memory to film to hand-held devices such as the cellphone or the codex. How does each of these shape our experience of ‘being in the world’, our relationships with others, our independence and creativity? As we receive and transmit the voices of others, how can authenticity survive between flux and fixture?
After the narrator of the novel drops his cellphone in the handbasin of the hotel on his way to conduct what will be the final published interview of his nonagenarian mentor, Thomas, a cultural eminance, he finds himself unable to admit that he is not recording, and ends up reconstructing the interview from memory. Towards the end of the book, the narrator’s onetime friend and alter ego, Thomas’s son Max, transmits a very different version of his father, showing that even our concepts of identity and value, intimacy and influence are altogether slippery and contingent.