I've now read Transcription twice and I still can't decide if it's about technology or parenting which is probably too simplistic an interpretation in either case. But no biggie; it's only 92 pages long and we can split the difference and call it a brain teaser about the impact of technology on three generations of human beings.
Author Ben Lerner (The Topeka School) divides the tricky narrative into three sections. All revolve around Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual who recalls hearing Hitler's voice in the womb as his mother listened to the radio in Weimar Germany. He's a polymath of great cultural significance and in the first section, an unnamed narrator, a poet in his mid-40s (like Lerner), takes the train to Providence, where he went to school (like Lerner), to interview his media-shy mentor and get his final thoughts "on the record" before he croaks.
But accidentally knocking his phone in the sink before they meet for dinner at Thomas's house leaves the narrator "praying for the illuminated apple," more acutely sensitive to his surroundings and full of reverie about his student days when his current wife dumped him and he fell into the duplicitous arms of her then roommate.
I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.
Rather than postpone the interview until he can record it as intended, the narrator deceives Thomas and asks him to treat their evening as an opportunity for boundary setting. Thomas complies, forbidding any mention of either his wife, who committed suicide, or his son Max, a friend of the narrator's, but warns that anything they discuss now will sound "rehearsed" if it comes up again the next day. Thomas, assuming that the narrator has already begun recording , refers to the narrator's fried i-Phone as a "little black box," a spot-on metaphor for the public's expectation that it will provide all the answers after an inexplicable plane crash.
Free association powers their conversation, genuinely give-and-take (and occasionally way over my head). But it's also chock full of what Taylor Swift fans would call "breadcrumbs," including dreams, performance, the history of illumination, 19th-century glass flowers, even sauerbraten. At one point, Thomas insists the narrator has misremembered the place where they collaborated on a project and the reader, like the narrator, understands in real time that Thomas already is well on his way to dementia.
The second, briefest section takes place in Madrid, giving the narrator an opportunity to digitally stalk his wife's former lover two decades after their affair ended. He's there for a conference, along with Max, to pay tribute to Thomas, not long after the great man's demise and the publication of the narrator's article which remains unseen. After he reveals his deception to the assembly of acolytes, a colleague he may or may not have slept with confronts him privately, asserting that Max, in particular, is angry. The narrator defends himself.
“A section of the interview was based on memory. That’s a scandal? I was trying to describe this kind of field of force around him. It was my setup to talk about his thoughts about recordings, ‘technologies of capture,’ and so on, right? And if anything I was making fun of myself. And believe me, I left out plenty of personal—”
“It was conducted under false pretenses. That’s what you revealed.”
“It’s routine for these interviews to involve—”
“Come on. It’s not routine to be told you’re being recorded when you’re not. It’s ironic, since most people are worried about being recorded unawares. And also the man was cognitively diminished.”
“I was honest about this childishly dishonest thing I did, yes, about how I regressed or was feeling—I don’t know. As I said, he seemed to even suspect—”
“That was unsettling, too.”
A lengthy exchange between Max, a lawyer, and the narrator comprises the novel's third, most affecting section. It reads a lot like a transcription because it's nothing but two voices, mostly Max's. As if pleading a case in court, Max describes his daughter's eating disorder and his fury at Thomas's mildly reproving reaction to the solution, although he isn't entirely without self-awareness.
Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!
Covid's arrival, of course, upsets everything and Transcription shifts from an almost entirely intellectual register into a highly emotional one, with Max describing what he believes are the final words that he will ever say to Thomas, using a nurse's i-Phone.
That "little black box" reveals the book's "secrets" (some of which remain open to interpretation) followed by an historical coda that suggests technology, in the end, hasn't changed what matters most in life much at all.
