Transcription

Today, let’s examine a new book, Ben Lerner’s 2026 novel, Transcription. Mr. Lerner is the acclaimed author of three previous novels and several books of poetry.

Transcription is written in first person, simple past tense although the first person narrator is a different character in the story’s third section which indicates the work of the implied author. There are three distinct sections to the book.

I’ll say more about this but today I want to compare the story’s beginning to a story written more than fifty years earlier, Alistair MacLeod’s very fine offering from 1974 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Hopefully, this exercise will reveal something about Mr. Lerner’s style.

Blood begins: “Now in the early evening the sun is flashing everything in gold. It bathes the blunt grey rocks that loom yearningly out toward Europe and it touches upon the stunted spruce and the low-lying lichens and the delicate hardy ferns and the ganglia-rooted moss and the tiny tough rock cranberries. The grey and slanting rain squalls have swept in from the sea and then departed with all the suddenness of surprise marauders. Everything before them and beneath them has been rapidly, briefly and thoroughly drenched and now the clear droplets catch and hold the sun’s infusion in a myriad of rainbow colours. Far beyond the harbor’s mouth more tiny squalls seem to be forming, moving rapidly across the surface of the sea out there beyond land’s end where the blue ocean turns to grey in rain and distance and the strain of eyes. Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.”

This story is written in first person, present tense, and is about a man who returns to Canada’s coastal area where he has a strong connection.

Here’s the beginning of Transcription: “I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or as my ten-year-old Eva put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I’m “facing the past.”

‘Kay. These stories represent very different styles. The beginning of Blood is formed of an intense amount of description. It’s beautifully written but gives little clue as to what the story is about. If we think of the basic questions that fiction should answer, Blood answers When—in the early evening, although this has an imperfect, timeless sense as if it could occur in any year. The last sentence references imagination’s mist, which suggests a consciousness perhaps looking out and imagining the sea. This may answer, or begin to answer, Who. And Where is answered, although again, to mention the seacoast facing east toward Ireland, is pretty imperfect and un-specific. So this passage is very timeless and open. And it asks the reader to be patient and appreciate the prose and the beauty. There’s no mention of technology which might place things more in time. What we learn going forward is that this relates to a story about a character who has a strong connection to this beauty.

If Blood is un-specific, Transcription is more particular, although still open. But not imperfect. We are reading a scene that occurs at one particular point in time. A character, an “I,” is on a train, trying to read while facing the rear of the moving train, a position which upsets his stomach. And “I” is trying to read something by “Thomas” whom “I” is going to interview. “I” has a ten-year-old daughter, Eva, who was traveling with “I” last summer to Lublin, which is in Poland, and she made a remark which can be taken literally—facing the past—and also more philosophically, that when the “I” is facing backward, “I” is facing the past, which is exactly what “I” is doing in this story by going to interview Thomas, an important figure from the past. The question Where is partially answered. The “I” character (and we don’t know the gender or age yet, although we might infer that it is a man, naively, because the real author, Ben Lerner is a man) is on a train but we don’t actually know where the train is. There is a mention of a city in Poland, although it is separated in time from the moving train. The question Who is answered—a person who gets nauseous sitting backwards on a train and who has a ten-year-old daughter.

Whereas the beginning of Blood tells us little about the protagonist of the story, Transcription has many references to an “I” who experiences. The “I” was falling asleep, was going to interview Thomas, was holding a book in its hand, etc. Technically these are called filters or filtering comments. Instead of showing what it’s like for a character to fall asleep, the writer uses “I was falling asleep.” It’s a reminder that the reader is reading about another character; the filter stands between the reader and the experience. It creates distance. There is considerably less distance in Blood, where the reader is put within a consciousness experiencing the seacoast.

Are these stylistic differences somewhat driven by the stories being written fifty years apart? Yes. In fact, in you wanted to write something that suggested the seventies, perhaps a character in the seventies, you could emulate the style of Blood and use long, lyrical sentences deeply embedded within a character’s perspective. And, if you wanted something contemporary, you could use filters to create distance. In either case, readers would be cued by the form.

If we look beyond the first paragraph of Transcription, we learn more about the story.

The train is going to Providence, Rhode Island. The “I” is masked, a pandemic reference which places things in time. The “I” writes, “My main concern was that I would somehow fail to record us on my phone…” This is foreshadowing; this fear is realized.

He texts his wife and mentions a hard morning getting their daughter to school (here we have a clear sense of the protagonist’s gender; he is male. He refers to “Eckert,” an unfamiliar entity who will become important later on. The conductor comes by and scans tickets that are on the protagonist’s phone—there are many references to technology, which is one of the book’s themes. He uses earbuds to listen to Thomas giving a talk in 1973.

He apparently falls asleep and dreams. “I was in Paris…I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. The gates swung open, but a woman—dark, beautiful, familiar…stopped me and said ‘Impossible.’ He realizes he’s about to cut into a line of other parents waiting and is embarrassed. The other parents are disgusted by him. He walks back to find the distant end of the line and realizes he’s walking away from his daughter.

There are a lot of unanswered questions: What is he doing the interview for? Why Providence and the train? What is his relationship with Thomas? (there are hints that it is more than professional). Why was the morning hard? Who is Eckert?

The dream seems to be about obstacles the protagonist must deal with in completing an important task—picking his daughter up from school. This process of working through obstacles is central to the story.

What also comes across in the beginning to Transcription is that many questions are raised because neither the protagonist nor the implied author explains everything. The reader is asked to be patient and wait for answers—which is a similar request that Blood makes.

Let’s stop there.

Till next time.

#Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray