Transcription

Transcription is smart as hell, but more interesting than moving.

An unnamed writer travels to Providence to interview Thomas, his aging former mentor, and drops his phone in the hotel sink just beforehand. Too embarrassed to admit he can't record, he does the interview anyway and reconstructs it from memory. From that tiny mishap, Lerner builds a meditation on memory, influence, fatherhood, and what gets lost when experience becomes a record.

There's a lot to admire. The prose is precise, and Thomas's restless talk can be exhilarating. Lerner is sharp on our dependence on phones and how, without them, we can become suddenly, uncomfortably present. It's funny too, especially in how seriously its characters take their own intellectual obsessions. And gradually, the interview starts to feel less like a transcript than a set of competing memories.

But Lerner packs in technology, art, fatherhood, Covid and eating disorders, and the novel sometimes feels like an exquisitely built demonstration of ideas rather than a story I cared about. The characters read less like people than articulate vessels for Lerner's thinking, and the lie that sets everything off feels too engineered. I wanted something to hold onto emotionally, but didn't get it.

Brilliant in places, but more an intellectual exercise than a novel I loved. 3/5