This is by Ben Lerner, and it was published this year. It was on the Five Books list of "Must-Read Novels of Summer 2026", and then suddenly there it was staring me in the face at Douglas Library.

And it has just won -- literally, a couple of days ago -- this year's Orwell prize for political fiction.

Two things, initially: It's not to be confused with Kate Atkinson's Transcription, which was published in 2018. Is it odd that two novels published so close together should have the same name...?

And it turned out to be a hotel novel... Not that I knew... Its three sections are labelled Hotel Providence, [Hotel Villa Real] (yes, with the square brackets), and Hotel Arbez, after significant events or conversations that happened in these places.

It's one of those novels that has left me slightly in two minds. I found it a little bewildering at first, but eventually I found all its various layers starting to coalesce, at least to some degree. I don't mind having to really think about a book. But I guess I started to wonder whether what I'd arrived at by the end was worth all that thinking...

As has been the case a couple of times lately, though, my doubts put me in a minority. Everyone else seems to rave about it.



***

In an effort to come down on one side or the other, I'll first recap the "story", such as it is, then set down the themes that struck me, and finally mine some critique to see whether the insights of others can propel me further into the fandom category.

First, a brief summary (there's a much richer one here).

In the opening part, our unnamed narrator is on his way to interview his old university mentor and friend, Thomas, now in his nineties, and starting, we suspect, to move beyond normal forgetfulness into something a little more worrying. The narrator (I'll call him N.) has already told us that he's anxious about screwing up the tech for this interview, and sure enough -- by one of those weird processes whereby our fears really become self-fulfilling prophecies -- he accidentally drowns his phone in the washbasin of his hotel room. He comes up with various plans (none of which, interestingly, involve actually TELLING Thomas what has happened, and postponing the interview until the next day), but eventually he goes through with the interview without recording it. Thomas is a confusing interviewee. Later, when Thomas wanders off (he doesn't really say goodbye), N. phones his family using Thomas's landline, telling them about his mobile mishap. He suspects his former mentor might have overheard his conversation -- and so might have realized he wasn't actually being recorded.

By the time we're into the next section, Thomas has died, and N. is at one of those academic jamborees where everyone talks about a dead guy's work. We don't know quite what happened after that unrecorded interview, because it seems that was all there was, and Thomas died without adding anything further. The academics are aghast at N.'s admission that the final interview was actually not recorded, but reconstituted from his memory.

The third section opens with Thomas's son, Max, telling N. (whom he has known for a long time) about the struggles he and his wife have been having with their daughter, Ellie, who for a while was refusing to eat, and was eventually diagnosed with ARFID (oh, how the world loves an acronym: Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder). N., in the first section, mentioned problems with his daughter, too. She was verging on a state of "school refusal", but we don't hear much more about that. The business with Ellie opened up a new rift with Thomas, whom Max didn't regard as that great a father, and whose input he bitterly resented (family dynamics had been severely tried a long time ago by the suicide of Virginie, Thomas's wife/Max's mother). When Thomas gets covid, and the hospital thinks he will die, Max has a phone conversation with him (well, more a monologue, actually, as Thomas is too weak to talk). He movingly expresses love and forgiveness. Then Thomas doesn't die, and Max isn't quite sure whether he understood and remembered those loving words or not, and doesn't feel he can repeat them. Visiting him in his home once he's discharged, Max decides -- in a contrasting parallel to the opening section -- that he will record their conversation. Thomas is forgetting things, and seems to be inextricably mixing Max up with N... Or is he, wonders Max, just messing with him? "Did he in fact know I was secretly recording him and so he was getting his revenge by erasing me?" This conversation, however, is the complementary bookend for the unrecorded one, and provides answers to some of the puzzles that initial "interview" left us with. Which is ironic. Even if N. had faithfully transcribed Thomas's words, they would have made little sense until they'd been set alongside the words Max DID record a little earlier, and alongside this conversation that N. and Max are having now.

Transcription, you see, might not be all it's cracked up to be. It's nothing without context. Or, at least, that's my interpretation.

***

Themes:

1. The glass flowers made by father and son glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka

These become a kind of constituent symbol for the whole novel. N. tells us about them, because when he first saw them, they produced for him "a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed". This dual way of looking at things stays with him. After seeing them, he's unmoved by "unspoiled" mountain views: "After the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful." He finds himself able to move between what he sees as "applied" lines and the natural phenomenon, and back again. It's a "quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child's game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I'd call this 'fiction'."

If the glass flowers throw into relief the question of reality versus construct, they also represent recording instruments. Since they vibrate in response to every influence around them, whether footsteps or voices, they are in effect -- though Lerner doesn't say it outright -- transcribers. And because their creators were father and son, they speak to the family theme as well.

There's a short epilogue with a quote from Leopold Blaschka in 1889: "Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation."

It's a clever motif.


Some of the glass flowers (most of those that have survived are housed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, in Massachusetts). This is Caesalpinia pulcherrima aka Pride of Barbados, by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, 1895

2. Media; radio; screens, phones

This is a huge theme. As N. moves through the city where he used to live, sans phone, on his way to the interview with Thomas, he realizes the lack of digital distraction is giving him "an unusual experience of presence". But this presence ironically brings him face to face with his past, "because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless". When N. arrives at Thomas's house, however, he finds himself missing his phone terribly: "I wanted -- I needed -- to check my texts, my email, to swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc, so as not only, not fully, to be where I was; since at least 2008, to be where I was was too much for me, or too little."

And this theme carries on rippling out. A big part of the book is concerned with recording or not recording; Max's daughter Emmie eventually makes progress with her eating when she's allowed to watch her screen at the same time; and although Thomas's metier was film, he was also influenced by radio, whose essence -- as a voice without a body -- replicates our experience when we first hear voices in utero (the radio in his childhood home in Germany was "on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet.") During covid, when Max is trying to communicate with the very sick Thomas, he tries a Zoom call (which fails), and then has a common-or-garden communication via phone (which may or may not have been remembered).

3. The reliability or otherwise of communication

How are we to transmit our messages, especially with people we love (who are also the people we get most impatient with)? It's not just what we say as what we don't say. In film, Thomas reflects: "The cut, the meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dark matter... Valery says God made the world from nothing but the nothingness shines through." So there's all that unseen stuff floating around.

And what we communicate has to be remembered; otherwise it's not really communication. Max is unsure whether Thomas remembers that hospital phone call, but suspects "that it was transcribed somewhere inside him". Did he remember? Did it enter his subconscious? In any case is transcription a reliable guide to what was communicated? As he secretly records the post-covid conversation with his father, Max thinks: "I wanted to preserve my connection to reality. To know that there would be a transcript, even if I never consulted it, in regard to my father, have something objective to test my experience against."

Given the inescapability of the past, the unreliability/instability of memory is highly ironic. The past is referred to throughout the novel, but it's inextricably bound up with the way we remember.

The final paragraph of the conversation between Thomas and Max -- an exchange that's laced with what might be jumbled memories or might be attempts at manipulation -- records how Thomas spoke to Max of the glass flowers (which were the narrator's experience, not Max's).

4. Interconnection, fluidity, shared consciousness, lack of individuation

Thomas is the arch-exponent of this theme. Some quotes: "There is always music playing that we cannot hear... The air is alive with messages. Messengers, angels..."; "A problem with Freud is he thinks we dream only our own dream... Waking does not end a dream... We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more." (And Thomas does indeed co-opt the dream N. tells him about; he inhabits it, interprets it according to his experience.) N. used to hear voices during the breakdown he suffered in his early years. At that point Thomas helps him by saying that we all hear phantom voices: "We hear AS IF. We are together, erring... Hallucination, too, is social." (This element reminded me very much of Ali Smith's Summer.)


Leopold Blaschka, 1822-95


Rudolf Blaschka, 1857-1939

5. Parents and children

There are many of these. We have the Blaschkas. We have Thomas and Max, who struggle with each other, to the extent that N. almost seems to displace Max by the end. When Max visits Thomas after his covid bout, he reflects: "Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgaenger." Max resents that when he's in real distress, all he can get out of his father is "some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references". Then there are Max and Adelle, and their daughter Ellie. This is a harrowing section. Parents don't instinctively know what to do when their offspring run into problems. In fact, they might instinctively do the wrong thing. Then there are N. and Eva. At the beginning of the text, N. has a dream in which he is trying to find Eva, and eventually realizes: "In my desperation to reach my daughter I was sprinting away from her."

6. Control over your life, your body, and others

There are many instances of a somewhat negative control (Virginie gave up on her life; Thomas was discussing Dignitas before he died; Emmie is on the way to starving herself to death; Eva is restricting her future by rejecting education).

But Thomas is also suspected of exercising the kind of control associated with a puppet master. Talking to his daughter on Thomas's phone, and wondering whether his host is listening in, N. also wonders whether Thomas had "arranged" the whole exchange: "Now I felt... that my mentor was conducting this electronic opera, orchestrating these interferences, crossing wires, worlds. Impossibly thin glass filaments underground, underwater, in the lungs, in the cochlea, vibrating when the small waves hit them -- You call this fiction, but it is more." Towards the end, Max questions whether his father is trolling him with his selective memories, and even wonders if his father faked his hospital stay...


Platanus orientalis, Rudolf Blaschka, 1906

***

That's a lot to pack into quite a slight book, I'll grant you... So kudos there.

Sieff describes Transcription as "at once dense and delicate". Agreed. But she continues: "I never feel, when I read Lerner, that his tricksy geometries eclipse emotion, sincerity, vulnerability." I'm not so sure... That third section, where Max is describing the pain of having a child who is wasting away in the midst of plenty, and a father who parries every cri de coeur with a litany of random information and abstruse ideas, I found incredibly moving. The rest of it, well, not so much... Its cerebral qualities felt -- to me -- somehow brittle.

I liked Joe Parker's summary of the transcription theme: "Where does editing become fabrication? At what point does a conversation become fiction? Is a faithfully remembered utterance more or less authentic than a mechanically recorded one? These questions are not new to literary theory, but Lerner embeds them in a social situation that makes them feel urgent and personal, not academic. The narrator is defending not just his editorial choices but his relationship with a dead man."

Hannah Rosefield expresses very beautiful the labyrinthine characteristics of the book: "There are uncanny correspondences between the events of the different sections: Experiences mirror one another and characters unknowingly mimic each other’s words. Intricate and unsettling, Transcription is a book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner’s refined, allusive fiction. It’s also a compelling exploration of how this hyper-literate sensibility, its intense interest in overlap and resonance, can lead us astray." Yes, that's good.

And she points out Thomas's essential self-centredness: "Max’s description of his father calls attention to how often Thomas’s words to the narrator in the book’s first section were dismissive or coercive, rerouting their conversation to Thomas’s own preoccupations. The details of the narrator’s dream are unimportant, Thomas insists; the narrator’s desire to establish the facts of Thomas’s upbringing is 'silly.'" You definitely get the impression that Thomas has survived by constructing this shield around himself. Nothing can get too close, because he'll talk it to death, pound it with theories and allusions and erudition.

Sukhdev Sandhu says Thomas is "less a character and closer to one of the Hannah Hoech montages he keeps by his fireplace, a Mittel-European philosopher of art and science who speaks in cubist shards. 'This I like about Freud -- much I don’t like -- that every discovery is rediscovery. Cinema recovers cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis.' His layered, associative sentences skip across time and place to riddling, thrilling effect." Again, a good way of putting it.


Hanna Hoech, Study for Man and Machine, 1921

Rosefield also argues, however, that Max is a chip off the old block: "Thomas and Max only want to see correspondences, real or imagined, between themselves and others, between their own interests and the interests of other people. They turn away from the particularity -- the reality -- of the person in front of them." That actually wasn't my impression. I warmed to Max more than to any of the others.

Katie Tobin helpfully pointed out the double meaning of the title: "Transcription also involves the replication of DNA for gene expression, one generation passing something of itself into the next."

And this critique succinctly gets to the heart of what the book's about: "The broken phone forces the narrator back onto the unreliable and irreplaceable storage system of the human mind, and in doing so it reveals that the human mind has always been, in some fundamental sense, broken equipment. Memory is not a recording. Love is not a transcript. Grief -- and this novel is quietly, fiercely about grief, though it doesn’t announce itself that way, because real grief rarely does -- arrives as a cascade of corrupted files that we spend the rest of our lives trying to open... Experience has always been mediated -- by language, by memory, by art, by the stories families repeat badly and compulsively for decades until the repetition itself becomes a kind of fate -- and to pretend otherwise is to pretend that there was once some pristine unmediated real that the iPhone ruined... Transcription is a defense of fiction. Not because fiction gets it right. But because fiction is honest about the distance between getting it right and trying." If any critique could make me warm to the book, it's that one.

***

After all that, where am I with Transcription? Still on the fence, pretty much. It's clever, and some of it is moving. But overall it left me a little cold.