Up a Creek Without a Phone

Transcription
By Ben Lerner
McLelland & Stewart, 144 pp., $34.95 (hardcover)
April 7, 2026

Forgery seemed easier than admitting to having forgotten to do a stranger a favour: this is how I came to fake Ben Lerner’s signature. I’d been working at the bookstore for six months—now it’s been seven years—and I don’t know whether it’s because I date my notebook or because our phones date everything, but I can tell you that it was five months before lockdown and masks up, five months before Covid gave us a new vocabulary that we didn’t and still don’t want, two years and four months before my father died, and three years, still, before I read the line, in Mean Free Path (2010), Lerner’s third book of poems, “the unsigned copies are more valuable,” though I’d already lived for four years as its bad example. 

Arjun was a customer who’d been coming to the bookstore with increasing frequency, assembling increasingly high stacks of books, spending increasingly stressful sums of money. He was young and kind, and, I feared, going through something. Unable to attend the Toronto launch for The Topeka School (2019) that was held at the bookstore, he asked me to get his copy signed to him. It was a yes that turned into a yikes because the event was soon over and I’d forgotten.

I used the word “signature” because it sounds better than “handwriting.” But Lerner had signed some leftover stock after the event, so what made my crime all the more perplexing in its insignificance was that I did not forge his signature so much as fictionalize his cursive handwriting of the name “Arjun.” I told no one; I feared termination. But Arjun never came to the store again.

The plastic bag stuffed with his final round of purchases, including The Topeka School, migrated to the basement, where it stayed through weeks of lockdown, then more months of curbside pickup, then yet more months of limited capacity browsing, even through the federally enforced banning of single-use plastic, with which the bag went from object to artifact. Eventually I took the novel home and shoved it into the very bottom of a floor stack. One night, a few weeks later, I tore out the title page—where the evidence of Lerner’s real and my fake handwriting had rearranged itself into a stain—and stuck the dirty bone of the book in a free library on Bloor. I went to bed with images of Arjun dead. Had he been dreamed, deleted, deepfaked? These are questions best answered in fiction.

Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), taught me a still-unraveling lesson about describing inscrutable actions in scrutable sentences: in a foreign country, in a second language he knows better than he will ever have you believe, the young narrator tells a group of people a story about how his mom, very much alive, came to be dead. A new reversal of this lie is what illuminates the hot cheeks of Transcription, Lerner’s fourth (also shortest) novel and ninth book, wherein a man pretends his very dead phone is alive. 

At the beginning of Transcription, the narrator is sitting on a train, wearing a mask, texting his wife about their daughter, Eva, and listening to the recording of a lecture from the 70s delivered in French by his former professor turned mentor, Thomas. He is also falling asleep. He dreams about Paris, a potential terrorist attack, and walking “against the direction of the line,” an apparent translation of his physical position on the train, seated opposite the direction of travel or, as he simultaneously recalls his daughter once describing, “facing the past.” This scene offers an opening spread of what has come to occupy Lerner’s recent palette: the language of dreams, fatherhood, text messages; the indentations of Covid as reflected in language and fears; the human voice, recorded and replayed; questions posed and demanded by children; the iPhone, shoved inside the pocket of all of it. Lerner’s recent short fiction has provided a site for some rehearsals of these themes, especially his exquisite short story “The Ferry,” which appeared in The New Yorker three years ago, and The Lights (2021), a collection of prose poems made of voicemails and dreams.

The narrator of Transcription is a forty-five year old poet traveling to Providence to interview Thomas, who was hospitalized during Covid’s first wave and has now just turned ninety (the reader gathers that this novel begins one or two or three years after 2020). The narrator is nervous about the interview, or less the interview than determining the right first question—“maybe something about translation”—and, more than anything, nervous about the potential failure of his phone to record, save, and send the interview to the commissioning magazine. It is no doubt a result of this doom that he almost immediately drops his phone in the sink, where he “watched [the water] spread, like the solution across a rapid antigen test.”  After finding the hotel receptionist, he notes: “I showed her my dead phone and said it fell into the sink, but it was clear she thought I’d dropped it in the toilet”—another lesson in how the truth can sound fake, just like fake handwriting can look real, just like a lie about a dead mother can ring true. Basically, the narrator has nothing but this novel to preserve the interview. 

It’s confusing, writing about Transcription. Its characters are confused, and so is its time. It feels almost impossible to describe the density of memory, perception, and voice that carries the novel; especially impossible to describe it while also giving equal weight—and one must!—to its completely easygoing beauty, the smoothness of its wash, the thrill of its sentences coming to inform—even invent, or originate—your own senses as you read it.

Transcription vibrates with reminders that meaning is made to suffer in sound, that anything spoken aloud might eventually be ascribed a shape in a written (or transcribed, or translated) sentence. Another frequent metatextual reminder: you are reading a novel written by Ben Lerner, as when the narrator tells Thomas, about his daughter, “I call her Eva in this book.” Lerner’s narration is studded with an awareness of its own technologies—syntax, description, duration—such as the belated remembering of the name of an old classmate: “By the time she got to the second syllable, I knew her”; or the words that immediately follow the phone plunge: “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged.” Ben Lerner is always asking and never answering the question: Is this language you’re reading a good example? 

Because the narrator has already set a time to arrive at Thomas’s house, there is nothing for him to do but walk there: “I would typically start walking directions on the map—even though I knew the way. And I checked my phone whenever a transition presented itself, whenever I left one space for another, or changed from a standing to a sitting position (or vice versa), or started or stopped walking.” During this walk, time compresses, or expands, and “ghosts gained flesh,” flickering around the scene like fireflies, or loose fliers blown in from the 90s, like images of the narrator’s wife, whom he met in college, as a young woman, and other old classmates like Max, Thomas’s son, as well as Anisa and—here, one of my own ghosts gains flesh—a character named Arjun. “And this time travel,” the narrator observes, “depended on my being prevented from checking on Eva or Googling ‘songbird life expectancy’ […] as I walked uphill.” The ur-Lerner desire for a “profound experience of art,” famously theorized in Leaving the Atocha Station, has a rhyme here in Transcription: the narrator is “having an unusual experience of presence.” 

Meanwhile I was having an unusual experience of prescience. Did my Arjun leave the bookstore, and the city, and walk into this novel? Lerner’s Arjun, we learn, was a friend of the narrator, lost to time and suicide, and once acted the part of a fumbling professor in a black box play. It’s all so true it sounds fake, so beautiful it ought to be a glass flower. You might assume I’m lying, but you’re wrong. His phone really did fall in the sink. 

Enter the interview that is a sort of dream of the interview. Everything in Thomas’s house—and this entire section, the first of three—feels a little blurry, just slightly off, like a play in which the jackets are all either too big or too small for the actors. Thomas, we learn, was born in Germany, has “founded or dissolved” a few genres; we don’t know which ones, though we understand them to be related to music and/or sound technologies, poetry and/or film. His house is filled with books and frames and canvases and vinyls and Hannah Höch (or Hannah Höch-like) collages, as well as a “series of little cameo portraits of German philosophers.” The scene unspools as if on a crayon-drawn cloud: cookies and coffee are served at dinnertime, and the narrator chooses to experience the music playing in Thomas’s house (Satie’s Gymnopédies) as the same as what had been playing in the hotel lobby, “the way some films hand off their theme from one site to another as the action unfolds.” Eventually Thomas asks if they are recording, the narrator makes a few fake taps on a dead screen (another black box, Thomas is quick to joke), and thus begins the dream: yes, they are recording.

It’s an instantly recognizable moment for anyone who has ever sat in a weird chair in a mentor’s house and who has then revisited that house and understood that that specific chair is now their chair even though they’d rather sit on the couch, or anyplace else. Sitting (on the couch!) opposite the narrator, Thomas glows with the light of a million mentors, maybe also God, and speaks in a cadence that has the texture of Oulipan poetry in translation, or a quickly scrawled dream: 

You should be asking me: What is this film music? What music do we hear that the child can’t, that the people looking for heirlooms or potatoes in the rubble can’t? Air looms. I am sorry to tell you what to ask. But there is always music playing that we cannot hear: beneath twenty hertz or higher than twenty thousand … But none of us truly knows what’s in the air; that’s one of the few universals. A negative universal. The air is alive with messages. Messengers, angels … The question is: Do we have ears to hear? Although sometimes we listen without them … And all of this is true of time, too, not only sound. Vibrations from the past or future may also be received.

Thomas exudes a knowledge that feels simultaneously ancient and improvised—past and future vibrations, indeed—and also, sometimes, flat-out impossible, like when he responds to the narrator with “Mille pardons,” a phrase that first appeared in English inside the narrator’s train dream. Thomas insists that “waking does not end in a dream. I am sorry to be firm. This is an error in dream interpretation; this is an error we Westerners make … We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more.” Our narrator is used to this kind of answer: “For Thomas, to listen to a story was to become involved in its composition.” The reader gets used to it, too. Transcription teaches us that to read a Ben Lerner fiction is to become entwined in its vision.

“[Hotel Villa Real],” the very short middle section, behaves like a sort of intermission, or smoke break, between the two acts (its brackets, an outline of a black box). Now we are in Spain, Thomas has died, and the narrator has just delivered a talk as part of a conference organized in celebration of Thomas’s life and work. In the lecture—which we do not hear—the narrator reveals that his interview (which was indeed published and, it turns out, was Thomas’s last) was partially fictionalized. His word is “reconstructed”; his justification is that he “was trying to describe this kind of field of force around him.” The dismay of Rosa, one of the curators, soon blooms into anger and—in a typical Lernerian articulation of compounded emotion—annoyance at the narrator’s anger at her anger. (A sustaining interest, again, in vocabulary and its victims.) Her reaction is slightly tempered by her belief that Thomas would have loved the whole thing. (I’m inclined to agree, and recall a moment in the first section when Thomas insists: “Yes, but the cut, the meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dark matter.”)

Cut to the final section of Transcription, in which we are placed before a sort of broken mirror of the first, composed entirely of dialogue between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max. A “real” transcription? We don’t know. (We’ve also, by now, probably forsaken any interest in the “real.”) But we do know that over the course of the novel, a drunk-feeling doubling between Max and the narrator has become impossible to ignore: both have troubled daughters, went to Brown at the same time, have suffered breakdowns. In the narrator’s interview with Thomas, differentiation between Max and the narrator becomes increasingly slurred. But this third section is carried by the clear and tender register of Max’s voice; the narrator rarely speaks, only ever to further a point, ask a question, strengthen a feeling, or simply to be cut off: “I see” and “Understood” and “I was surprised because—.” Their exchange occurs after Thomas has died, but is largely Max’s recollection of, among a million other interconnected things, Thomas’s hospitalization in 2020.

This final movement picks up the impeccably described choreographies of Covid and Apple products that appear in mostly isolated bursts in the first chapter and quickens them, combines them, makes them vibrate together. The weight of Transcription lands most deeply in Lerner’s neither dramatized nor diminished inclusion of vocabulary that constitutes the shared dream of our present: scrolling or pretending not to scroll and masking or thinking about masking but not feeling like it; screentime and N95s; “you have arrived at your destination” and “masks are strongly recommended”; swiping, pressing, tapping; coughing, isolating, sanitizing. Lerner does not write  “about” cellular devices or “about” the pandemic so much as transcribe their language onto the technology that is the novel. Transcription takes two things (our phones, Covid) that most of us spend a lot of energy trying not to look at—because boring, because move on already, etc.—and shows us that while they cannot be avoided, their meaning is not a given: language is ours to take. Examples are mostly fiction, and handwriting is always fake.

DREAM 1 OF A POSTSCRIPT: Three days separated the death of my father’s brain and the death of his body, and I spent them transcribing a panel discussion between artists, curators, and activists about temporary public art projects centered around the preservation of the Don River in Toronto. There was never a question of whether I’d leave the country to go to him (Omicron, etc., no, mille pardons) or whether I’d call the hospital (no, he couldn’t have heard my voice) or whether I’d stop transcribing (but the deadline, was my excuse, because I hadn’t asked myself the right first question). I looked at my screen and visualized semicolons instead. A glitch becomes a glimmer, and he [Light pause] [Silence] [End].

DREAM 2 OF A POSTSCRIPT: Alexander Kluge, a longtime friend and collaborator of Ben Lerner—whose books, in German, are stacked in Thomas’s apartment—died during the writing of this review. The Snows of Venice, a book collaboration or “container” between the two, includes an interview that Lerner recorded himself. The pair sits at a table at a Japanese restaurant in lower Manhattan and Kluge wants to order three green tea crème brûlées. 

B.L.: We should order.

A.K.: Press stop. 

B.L.: I don’t want to stop it because I’m afraid I’ll delete it.

[They order.]

Claire Foster is a reader, writer, and literary translator from French. She also works as a bookseller at TYPE Books. Her criticism has appeared in Bookforum, the Cleveland Review of Books, and Public Books, and her translation of Valérie Manteau’s novel, The Furrow, is forthcoming this October from Invisible Books.