Ben Lerner’s 'Transcription' Is a Labyrinth

Early on in Transcription, Ben Lerner’s new novel, the narrator finds himself without a cell phone. (Or more precisely, without a working cell phone: He knocked his into a sink full of water just before leaving his hotel.) As he walks through the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, phonelessness becomes a state of extreme presence. He’s “more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk.” He is also returned to his past. Two and a half decades ago, he was at college in Providence; now, unable to contact the world beyond—unable to “swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc.”—he is thrown back on his memories. He sees in a passer-by one of his old professors; he expects his fortysomething wife, back home in New York, to appear as the student she once was.