Review of Transcription by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026)
In a short story called “Wireless,” published in Scribner’s in 1901, Rudyard Kipling described “a glass tube” with “two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust.” Fiddling with the plugs, Kipling’s protagonist slips into a trance and spontaneously transcribes John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a poem he has never read. In an instant, the man becomes a conduit for the unseen flows of text and speech that circulate continuously in the atmosphere. This machine, he says, “will reveal to us . . . the Power — our unknown Power — kicking and fighting to be let loose.”
The machine Kipling had in mind was the wireless telegraph, a device that existed only a decade or so before being supplanted by the radio. But you who poke at the glass of your glowing rectangle know exactly where to find “the Power” today. It emanates from the device you call, anachronistically, your “phone.”
Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, begins when the narrator dunks his phone in a hotel sink, turning it into a “wounded animal” that he cannot revive. The loss sends him into a panic. Without the device, he can hardly imagine speaking to his young daughter, with whom he is accustomed to FaceTiming.
The drowned iPhone also sparks a professional, even writerly crisis in the narrator. The narrator has traveled from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island, to interview his mentor, a world-renowned academician named Thomas. Thomas is the only person the narrator knows, apart from his ten-year-old daughter, who does not own a smartphone. “Those screens, my love, they dull our senses,” the old man is fond of saying. Without a working smartphone, the narrator has no way to record the interview.
Walking to Thomas’s house, he experiences “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication.” Incapable of “sending or receiving data…
Auteur: Jonah Walters
