Transcription by Ben Lerner audiobook review – a mediation on memory for the smartphone era

Actor Seth Numrich vividly captures the neurotic tendencies of a middle-aged man with a digital dependency, in an intense multilayered tale of family and storytelling

We meet the unnamed narrator of Transcription on a train to Providence, Rhode Island. He is going to interview his one-time mentor Thomas, a celebrated German writer and film-maker, who is 90 and who, owing to his age, probably won’t be interviewed again. The narrator confesses to his young daughter, Eva, that he is nervous about the meeting. Those nerves are replaced by panic when he gets to his hotel and drops his iPhone into a sink of water, rendering it useless. Not only does he have no means of recording the interview, he won’t be able to FaceTime Eva at bedtime.

Ben Lerner’s novella is a thoughtful meditation on memory, storytelling and lives lived through technology. The middle-aged narrator’s anxiety over his phone falls away as he engages with the world around him and with his past. He is pleased at being “able to convert the sense of being screenless into a kind of super­sensitivity” though later, in Thomas’s house, he finds himself “glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level, shamefully unresponsive to the old media that surrounded me”. For the interview, he pretends to record the conversation on his dead phone and tries to commit Thomas’s words to memory.

Actor Seth Numrich is the reader who ably negotiates the multilayered prose, the unusual narrative flourishes (such as Transcription’s breaking of the fourth wall) and teases out the neurotic tendencies of Lerner’s protagonist. In the final chapters, the narrator has an intense conversation with Thomas’s son, Max, which offers new perspectives on his father and exposes the murky line between truth and fiction.

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