Lola Seaton in Sidecar:
Ben Lerner once described Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) as a ‘bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’. Something similar could be said of Lerner’s new novel Transcription. It opens with the unnamed narrator, a Lerner-like writer, sitting backwards on a train – ‘facing the past’, as his ten-year-old daughter Eva says – and falling asleep, and it’s as though we too enter a dreamlike state. As in a dream we are engrossed without being entirely sure why, puzzled but untroubled by what we don’t understand, including the relationship, chronological and otherwise, between the juxtaposed halves of this short beguiling book.
The first, ‘Hotel Providence’, recounts a surreal evening the narrator spent with his ‘mentor’, Thomas, now ninety, whom he has come back to his college town to interview for a magazine. At his hotel he drops his phone – his only means of recording – in the sink. Walking through Providence ‘deviceless’, memories from his student days arise. It seems ‘impossible’ to admit to his screw-up so he decides they can talk in a preparatory way, then conduct the interview the following morning after he has been to the Apple Store. But the conversation gets out of hand. Thomas asks if the narrator is recording and he pretends he is, placing his broken phone on the table next to them.
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