Sunday book pick: ‘Transcription’ brings us memories of a moment not ‘recorded’

Ben Lerner’s fourth novel, Transcription (and the second I have read this year), is a fabulous, shape-shifting, perceptive story of facts, recreation, and digital behaviour. In a fully digital world, the novel raises questions about how two humans behave when a device is placed between them. Do we automatically begin performing for an audience that isn’t yet there, or do we see simply it as a permanent, depthless bank of information and memory?

What is a memory worth?

Constructed as a triptych, the novel begins with a 45-year-old writer who is as dependent on his phone as anybody else. He travels to Providence to interview his 90-year-old mentor and a formidable cultural icon, Thomas. This is Thomas’s first interview in decades, and the narrator wants to make the most of it.

However, hours before the interview, the narrator’s phone dies when he accidentally drops it in a sink of water in the hotel bathroom. There are no backup devices – not even a notepad and a pen – and the narrator flies into panic trying to locate an Apple store to replace the phone. He doesn’t find one. What might have been a mere hiccup turns, in Lerner’s hands, into an “accident” that induces great anxiety...

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