The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
A short, smart novel about parenthood and influence; about how much of our lives we have ceded to the black rectangles in our pockets - Observer
Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand - Daisy Johnson
Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more
Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender - an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now - Sophie Mackintosh
'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner ... is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why - Telegraph
Puzzle-like... a smart and subtle meditation on technology, memory and the Covid pandemic, as well as a very human story about family and fatherhood. You'll read it, then want to read it again - GQ
A Lerner novel is always an event - FT
[Poses] daunting questions about how we process information and what memory is - AnOther
A layered exploration of memory, masculinity and technology - Mail on Sunday
A powerfully distilled novel about fathers and sons, mortality and inheritance and the technologies shaping our lives - Bookseller
