Allison Brown (managing editor): I’m writing this recommendation for Transcriptionas I sit on a beach in Rhode Island, lightly hypnotized by the waves rushing and breaking and throwing patterns of seafoam on the shore before withdrawing back into the expanse. A friend had given me a copy of Ben Lerner’s latest as a gift to take with me from NYC to the Ocean State. I imagine the Providence setting of its first section inspired my friend’s selection; most probably, too, the book was easy to reach for, as it seems to be ubiquitous, at least in certain quarters—hence our special all-Transcription edition of the Shabbat Reading List.
In many ways, this slender novel makes an excellent beach book. At 130 pages, it can be read in a day, and although it’s erudite, the sentences go down smoothly. Its dreamy quality, the way its characters slide between past and present as their associations unspool, pairs well with the way the sun and sea tend to loosen time. And there’s plenty in the novel’s drama to relate to—especially if you’ve recently become middle-aged, or become a father, or have ever been a son, surrogate or otherwise.
In other ways, however, Transcription feels made by and for an MFA classroom, where it can be analyzed and celebrated for its dazzling hall-of-mirrors treatment of what our narrator calls, in a word, “fiction”—a “quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion.” This driving concern with art and the nature of representation gives the book a cleverly self-reflexive quality.
In my classroom days, such formal achievement would have been enough, but as I myself have settled into middle age, I am increasingly drawn to writing that feels less composed and more yielding to its oceanic wild side. Fortunately, Transcription exceeds its formal accomplishments. It may domesticate the uncontainable ocean into the metaphor of a cup of water, but that bit of water is enough to destroy the cell phone that the novel’s narrator relies upon as a stabilizing tether and, crucially, as the recording device for his anxiously anticipated interview with his aging, ailing mentor. We may, like the narrator, be unable to admit we have arrived at the scene of contact ill-prepared. But even as Transcription pronounces contact “impossible,” it insists on wrestling with the broken mediums through which we try to reach ourselves and each other, and through which we reach for the past and it reaches out to us. The resulting record may be unstable and unreliable, but the intimacy and love it transmits make Transcription vibrate—to use a key concept from the book—on many powerful frequencies.
A. Gopalan (senior editor): Several years ago, I had the opportunity to interview a famed scholar in my field. I started the Zoom call with jitters, notebook in hand and focus sharp. But as soon as I turned on the recording software, I experienced a numbing hit of something like serenity: The technology, I realized, was preserving her answers for posterity, so I didn’t have to focus on the conversation—or at least, not as intensely. I could instead half-listen while fretting about my next question, compulsively click around on my computer, resist the pull of my phone, and try to arrange my features into a sufficiently intelligent expression. Halfway through the interview, however, a scary pop-up emerged: “Connection unstable.” The bright-red recording button started blinking in and out and the audio waves began flatlining. But my respondent was deep into an answer about the origins of capitalism, and it was beyond my grad student social skills to interrupt her. Heart in hand, I led us through another half-hour of pre-scripted discussion, and only then, with a thousand prayers, did I log into the interview folder. The worst had happened: There were no files saved, no record of the conversation.
In the months to come, I went through the mortifying ordeal of emailing the professor to let her know of my fuckup, appealing to her for a second interview, and eventually securing it. But I could not shake the feeling that our second conversation—which I recorded on three different devices, and with handwritten notes—was stilted, not as rich as the first. I took what I could get, of course, but the whole encounter jarred me. It turned out technology could not be relied upon after all. My anxieties could not all be dulled by the promise of a permanent record, a “later” when I could revisit a present I could rarely tolerate as it unfolded.
This extended prologue is meant to say: I devoured Ben Lerner’s Transcription in one sitting. The book’s “plot,” if you can call it that, is an intensified version of the experience I have recounted above. The book’s unnamed narrator is scheduled to interview his longtime mentor Thomas, a world-famous scholar of something-or-other, but right before the session, our hero drops his phone into the sink. Tech support thus squandered, he is left with no choice but to fake his way through the interview, first trying to defer the “real” conversation, then—after failing to pause Thomas’s elliptical retelling of his life—simply pretending to record on his dead phone. Unlike in my case, this narrator is not afforded a do-over: Thomas dies shortly after the interview, and the conversation is preserved only in the narrator’s recollection.
The book’s themes—the unstable nature of memory, the singular and fleeting arc of time—are familiar, but in Lerner’s masterful hands, they become something electric. Transcription reads like a mystery novel, only the reader is the detective. What really happened in the conversation between Thomas and the narrator? What was the actual substance and significance of Thomas’s life? What was the full truth of Thomas’s relationship to the narrator, and to his son, who emerges as a protagonist in the final third of the book? We can never really be sure, but throughout the book’s three acts, there are scattered clues—lines and phrases that repeat, motifs that recur, stories that mirror one another—and despite myself, I found myself gathering them in yellow and pink highlights, bookmarks, notes. I could not shake the feeling that this spare story was the result of Lerner smashing a pane of glass against the book’s spine, and I was wandering among the shards, picking them up, trying to fit them together into some sort of coherence.
But the quest was doomed. The glass is there not to reconstitute, but to reflect. Ultimately, this is the gift of Transcription: starkly drawn, intensely relatable moments of close observation. When Lerner’s narrator writes of his “withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication” at being severed from his phone; his need to hold a device so as to “not only, not fully, be where I was”; his “glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level,” I felt seen. When, later, Thomas’s son speaks of how the device “takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear”—I felt understood. What was this, if not a description of my experience of turning over to a device the task of listening to a scholar I so admired, with whom I had for months dreamed of intellectual exchange? What, in fact, are any of the moments of failed connection in Transcription if not reflections of the times when we fail to make contact with our mentors, fathers, and children, because we are moving toward them with instruments of mediation in hand, brandished like shields?
Mari Cohen (senior editor): Once upon a time, I read all my favorite books more than once, because I sped through my stacks of plot-heavy middle-grade fiction from the library faster than I could replenish them. Of course, as I grew up, my free time shrank while the quantity and complexity of books I wanted to read—and the share of my attention devoted to screens—ballooned; getting through something one time now feels like enough of a feat. But with Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the stars aligned for a double-dip. It’s a petite, propulsive book, just 144 pages, and it came out during my four-month sabbatical, the most time I’ve ever had for reading in my adult life (thank you, Jewish Currents Union!). The first time I read it, last December, I stayed up till 3 am at my parents’ house finishing my galley ebook. I raced through the last few pages marveling at how Lerner had managed to collect the book’s varied narrative and conceptual threads into a single, shimmering final image. I remember falling asleep in a haze of awe, smug in the knowledge that I was having a full-body “profound experience of art” that Lerner famously found so elusive in his debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station. By March, when the book’s publication date arrived and the rave reviews were rolling in, I already struggled to remember the texture of the book and what had led me to deem it such a perfect novel. So I took a few hours to read it again. I was happy to be re-immersed in Lerner’s smooth prose and sly humor, but at the end I no longer could locate the exact moment that had produced such aesthetic ecstasy the first time around. Was the effect just diminished upon repeat, the magic of first recognition impossible to recapture? Or had I overzealously willed myself into it the first time, seeing something that wasn’t exactly there?
In a way, this dilemma was a fitting accompaniment to the new Lerner novel, which itself takes up questions of memory, repetition, technology, and cultural transmission. The narrator—as usual a rough stand-in for Lerner—visits his alma mater in Providence to record an interview with Thomas, his intimidating, aging academic mentor. When his phone breaks, he’s too embarrassed to tell Thomas and ends up having a lengthy conversation with the nonagenarian that he pretends to record and must, presumably, reconstruct from memory later. As readers, of course, we are left wondering if the scene we are reading is the narrator’s experience in media res or its own fudged reconstruction, though, of course, what would it mean for us to access the “real” scene, if it what we are talking about, at the end of the day, is a piece of fiction? (Lerner is not subtle in guiding us here: “I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on . .eventually, I’d call this ‘fiction.’”) Later, this “Ben” confronts the anger of Thomas’s family and colleagues when they discover that he has indeed presented a scene out of memory as a veritable interview transcript. By the end of the novel, without giving away too much, we’ve witnessed the inverse of the scene, in which another character admits to having once actually recorded a conversation with Thomas without telling him. The secretly unrecorded and secretly recorded conversations become most legible when considered as a porous pair, with language and memories weaving between them.
Transcription joins a long list of novelistic attempts to make visible the small penciled decisions that create what we call fiction, and thereby induce a sort of destabilizing vertigo as to the nature of reality. (See Atonement by Ian McEwan, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi, Auditionby Katie Kitamura, and many more.) By foregrounding the trappings of the digital age, Lerner heightens this sense of instability, since the virtual world is at once only virtual and yet inescapably bound up in the material world. As one character says of the nurse whose cell phone he called to say goodbye to his gravely ill father, “It’s silly, but I felt connected to her because I’d said those things on her personal phone . . . So strange to think I’d said what I’d said on a device that she’d take home, that she would touch with her hands and face, that she would charge behind her bed.”
As always, Lerner manages to distinguish his take on this trope through his singular command at the line level. Before he was a novelist, he was a poet, and in his work I’ve always been drawn most to his attunement to the rhythm of a sentence. Here, the patterns often echo Lerner’s most recent poetry collection, The Lights, in which he frequently plays with iteration and repetition (from the prose poem “The Voice”:“My father was a / poet: He made a world for me, a toy folk tradition Or my / father was a fraud: How else had he deceived me? Or my / father was a comedian: He knew I’d figure it out in the end / and find it funny”) and often lines up disparate subjects next to one another, using parallel forms to describe contrasting content, and then eventually blends these separate ingredients together. Transcription takes this intra-poem trick and expands it to the scale of the novel. It presents consciousness as a collage of push notifications on an iPhone: the absurd, mundane, weighty, and trivial; the father and the mentor; the present and the past; all atop one another, inside one another, inside every moment.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Shelach from Maya Rosen
(ed. note: this week’s parshah was previously published in 2024; we will have a new parshah next week)
Over the past nine months, I have returned again and again to a phone conversation I had with my mother-in-law in May 2021, amid a major Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Sitting in Jerusalem, I couldn’t stop thinking about the rising death toll, or how the violence unleashed against the growing protest movement in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah was spreading across the country. When my mother-in-law—who left northern Israel for New England in the late 1990s—asked how I was doing, I responded with despair. “Well, of course,” she replied, “it’s a land that devours its inhabitants.”
She was quoting a verse that appears in this week’s parshah, Shelach. When Moses sends 12 spies from the desert to scout the Land of Israel, they return in unanimous agreement that the land is “flowing with milk and honey,” just as God promised. But ten of the spies caution against entering the region, regaling the terrified Israelites with tales of the giants who dwell in this “land that devours its inhabitants.” The people, doubting God’s plan for them, propose a return to Egypt. Enraged by the spies’ report and the Israelites’ lack of faith, God threatens to wipe out the entire people and start over with a new nation descended from Moses alone. Only after Moses begs for mercy does God curtail the punishment, proclaiming that while this generation will die in the desert, their children will enter “the land that you have rejected.” The traditional commentators see the ten spies’ actions as sinful, and even as the cause of future devastation. The Mishnah, for example, claims that the spies “have no share in the World to Come.” And according to the Talmud, the day the spies returned to the camp was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, or Tisha B’av, a date that marks the destruction of both Temples, along with other calamities. In fact, as one midrash relates, it was at the very moment that the spies delivered their report that the Temple’s fate was sealed and the Jewish people doomed to exile.
But elsewhere in the Talmud, the sinning spies appear in a quite different light. We’re told that a minyan—the quorum of Jews necessary to pray collectively and say specific blessings—requires ten people because this was the number of the naysaying spies. Why would our model of communal assembly, for gathering together to sanctify God’s name, derive from these spies of ill repute, from a bitter communal rift? Notably, the ten spies who sought to dissuade the people from entering the Land agree with the other two about the factual report; they simply disagree about the inevitability of devastation. Perhaps, our tradition is trying to tell us, being in a collective requires being able to look catastrophe in the eye. This suggests that the ten spies went wrong not in their grim assessment of the nature of the Land, but in their desire to turn back from it rather than confront its calamity. Indeed, the Sefat Emet, a 19th-century Hasidic rabbi, links the phrase “a land that devours its inhabitants” to a description of God in the book of Devarim as “a devouring fire.” Despite this devouring quality, the Sefat Emet notes, we are still told to cleave to God.
In this respect, the spies may only be a partial model. Yet they still show us that holy assemblies are formed in relation to cataclysm and communal schism. Our task, it seems, is to be resolute where they wavered—to turn fully toward the current catastrophe and the work of ending it. Like the generation of the spies, we may not be the ones who reach the Promised Land. But by joining together in this minyan of dissent, our wandering can begin to chart a way there.
Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.
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