Review | ‘Transcription’ by Ben Lerner is a wake-up call for our hyper-connected world

A familiar heaviness might just park itself within you if you unthinkingly, and without a preview, step into the pages of Transcription, the new novel by American poet and novelist Ben Lerner. Momentarily keeping aside the larger issues unearthed by this tiny book, you might slip right onto the page, onto the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, alongside the narrator, as he walks to the house of Thomas, his old mentor. You’ll have strangely clear pictures of the church he passes, the Athenaeum, the shadows of trees and the people who look like others he knows. This is not because of the detailed writing but the position that the narrator finds himself in, that, if you have ever been attached to a smartphone, you could easily identify with. He has dropped his phone in water and it has stopped working, minutes before he is to do an interview. The lack of a device to be lost in makes everything else extraordinarily clear, at least in your head.But the heaviness sets in before, if you are, like the narrator, in the habit of predicting every way an assignment could go wrong. He had feared the recording may not work, and then goes ahead and drops the phone, his only recording device. His incomprehension of being outside a world he has been so connected to can make you eerily empathetic and that’s when the novel, winner of this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, turns into a wake-up call. A snapping finger.Is the writer needed anymore?The interview is with Thomas, a respected figure in the world of art and culture. Thomas, 90, talkative and often digressive, slips into details the narrator cannot record, of theatre and radio and dreams. He asks after his student’s wife and child and talks about his son Max, a friend of the narrator. At every good phrase or technicality, you might miss a heartbeat, fearing if the narrator will remember it, wondering why he wouldn’t fall back on the traditional pen and paper. He is 45 years old, not unfamiliar with the old methods that journalists documented history with. You might blame it on the addiction of smartphones but it is also perhaps an urge to escape the past. The narrator claims that he begins to experience the world around him more acutely, when he is unplugged. But then he had heard the piano music of his hotel before he sunk his phone, and noticed the mismatched couches and fake flowers there. What does become clearer to him when he goes offline are moments and faces from his past that he has long left behind. Author Ben Lerner | Photo Credit: Getty Images The book, short as it is, is divided into three sections, and surprisingly manages to pack itself with more difficult themes. How much of fiction is in the nonfiction that you read or write? This will be an uncomfortable question that dances before you, given that you know the narrator has not documented a single word of Thomas’ interview and has written it down from memory.You might find yourself even more distrustful of a mere human device as memory at a time when Artificial Intelligence promises to guess every word spoken in that unrecorded interview. But where is the need of a writer if they only serve as a sounding board, where is the place for imagination if you can’t describe an expression or a feeling that is unsaid?These questions need not pop into your head as you read Transcription. It can spring up when you muse about it later and this is a book that needs a lot of musing about. If you are especially imaginative, you might begin to wonder if the narrator, who is conveniently unnamed, is in fact Thomas’ son Max, who is of the same age; both have struggling little daughters of similar sounding names. You might take it a step further and then wonder who is the fantasy of whom here. This is the problem with poets, they make everything complicated. A teacher and an old student cannot just have a conversation without making it an existential question. Jokes apart, you should read Lerner, if not for the issues he raises, for the words that line up one after the other so beautifully. Transcription Ben LernerGranta Books₹1,790The reviewer is a constant reader and an aspiring writer from Kerala. Published - October 27, 2026 01:00 pm IST