Review of Transcription by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026)
Authenticity, performance, the thin line between fact and fiction: these are, by now, the well-known central preoccupations of Ben Lerner’s fiction. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, follows an American poet named Adam Gordon in Madrid in 2004, who witnesses the aftermath of the 11-M commuter train bombings. Adam is a divisive lead; he’s solipsistic and drifts through the city on a self-medicated cocktail of marijuana and coffee. He can barely speak Spanish, though he somehow captures the romantic attention of two beautiful women. “I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar,” Adam says. “I was a real American.”
In The Topeka School, a sequel of sorts, Lerner used the competitive high school debating circuit and the “violent identity crisis among white men” in 1990s Kansas as a prehistory of, among other things, the demise of civic integrity in Donald Trump’s first term (to say nothing of the second). And now we have Transcription, a book that revisits his long-standing concerns with fraudulence and masculinity — this time, with a far greater interest in the role technology plays in mediating the two.
The story begins with our middle-aged unnamed narrator, a writer, traveling to Rhode Island to conduct an interview. His subject is Thomas, his German-born, ninety-year-old former mentor and the father of his best friend, Max. When the narrator drops his phone into the sink of his hotel room, it stops working, and he’s left without a recording device. He decides to visit Thomas’s house anyway, hoping that their initial discussion might serve as a warm-up and that the proper interview can start once his phone is fixed the following day. But the narrator’s plan promptly goes awry when Thomas is ready and eager to begin the interview immediately. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural,” Thomas says. “We will sound like bad actors. Even the…
Auteur: Katie Tobin
