Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Transcription,' by Ben Lerner

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Download the New York Times app to start watching. Hello, and welcome to the book review. I'm MJ Franklin, I'm an editor here at the New York Times book review back with our May book club discussion. This week, we're chatting about transcription by Ben Lerner. We chose this book for book club for a few reasons.

“First, it's the return of Ben Lerner, how could we not speak about it?”

Ben has written a series of acclaimed philosophical books, including the Topeka School, which was a New York Times best book of 2019, and 1004, which was in New York Times best book of the 21st century. So far, a new Ben Lerner book is an events period, and we went into dive in.

So that's the first reason. The second reason is Ben Lerner's new book.

Transcription is, I think, a puzzle box of a book. It's a book that seems to continually unfold with new layers. And as such, it's a book that demands to be discussed. And so, we are here to dive in, and joining me on that adventure, are two of my esteemed colleagues.

First, we have Greg Cole's an editor here at the book review, and a returning book cluber, Greg, welcome back. Thank you, MJ Glad to be here. Also with us, as Alexander Jacobs, a staff critic here at the book review, and also the person who reviewed transcription for us.

Alexander, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I was realizing this is not only the first episode of the book club, but then on, it's actually the first book club I've ever attended, whether I know that the book club is just a name,

and this is a virtual book club, however, I've never once been to a book club.

Listen, since you need just circulating wildly and confusion. This is your first book club ever. It's my first book club ever. I might be philosophically opposed to them. Tell me your thoughts. How are you feeling?

I feel fine now. Not philosophically. I mean, I support them, of course. I actually, my parents used to have one, as I recall, and as I recall, my father was a psychiatrist, and he would convene fellow doctors in their living room to have one.

So I would walk past it. But I never joined that book club. Yeah, right. I don't think there would be a group there as well.

“I guess I think generally the reading is a bit of a private experience.”

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. But clubs in my observation, I perceived them as performative, or I know too many people who've not done the reading, or find their book club a burden.

So I will make a few promises. One, we have all done the reading. We have all done the reading. We have done the reading.

And the second promise, Greg, can you help me with this?

We will make this book club a seamless, as fun, as lively as possible. I'll do it again. Well, with that, the pressure is on. Before we dig in, I have my typical admin notes first. There will be spoilers in this episode.

As much as this book can even be spoiled, I feel like the story is just the surface. And so much more is happening. But that said, usually we try to save spoilers to the end of the episode. But this is a book where I think you just have to talk about three parts together.

And so this time around, there will be spoilers throughout. There will be a lot of big picture theorizing.

“So if you don't want spoilers, if you want to go into this episode fresh,”

pause this episode, go read the book. It's a quick 130 pages, and then come back to us. We'll be waiting for you. That's note number one, note number two. At the end of the episode, we will reveal our June book club books.

So stay with us at the end to find out what we're reading next. And with that, let's dive in. Grad, would you set the table for us and tell us what is transcription? What is this book? Sure.

So you've done a little bit of that work for me. You mentioned it's in three parts. You mentioned it's very short. So think of it as a trip to each of the three parts centers on a conversation. The first part, our unnamed narrator book opens with him on a train going up to see

a very meaningful mentor in his life from his college years to interview him. The mentor is now age 90, and this is presumably the last interview. He's going to interview him for a magazine. And before he can conduct the interview, he drops his cell phone into a sink filled with water at his hotel and bricks it and is unable to record the interview.

And so how convenient for the narrative? Part two takes place in Madrid after the mentor has died and the unnamed narrator is speaking at an event to celebrate the mentor's life and confesses to everybody that he had no recording of that interview and wrote it based on his reconstructed memories.

people who had been quoting the interview and taking it as gospel.

And one thing I didn't say when I've said that Thomas the mentor was significant in the narrator's life is that the narrator was also friends in college with Thomas's son. And Thomas's son Max takes the third section of the book and really just monologues at us for the whole section to the narrator who gets a few little interjections in there. But essentially all of the third section consists of Max talking about his relationship with his father,

his relationship with his daughter, his young daughter, and that's the book. There's a lot more to say about it, but that's the basic structure. Alexander, is there anything that you would add to that?

“No, there isn't. I remember I had to review this quite quickly and that's why presumably I'm qualified to attend this book club,”

and yet I just remember being actually shocked at how short it wasn't still qualified and awful. The one thing I would add to the set up is what Greg does outlined is the story and this is a book where the story is the surface. So much is happening throughout this book throughout its slim 130 pages. Oh, and also I would add one thing I noticed almost immediately. He called it a Greg, you called it a trip tick.

I immediately I can never think of Ben Lorner without thinking of his mother Harriet.

I don't know mother Harriet. Oh, yeah, so. So Harriet was in the 80s when you were just a glimmer in your father's eye Harriet Lorner was had this best selling book called The Dance of Anger. I think it was published in the 80s. Interesting. Right. I think that's right. I can see the cover so clearly. It was part of this wave of self-help books.

She is famously, she's a psychotherapist. So is Alexander's father. Yes. And by the way, what have scorned a pop psychology book like The Dance of Anger? Harriet Lorner was a youngie in psychoanalyst and there's-- I think she's still a wife.

It is a youngie in psychoanalyst. Thank you. And if you know anything about young, you know that the collective unconscious is the thing that was right. And it's there in everything Ben Lorner writes. The characters are almost interchangeable because they're all part of this giant collective. And he talks to all the time about we share our reality.

And it's where we don't that the slippage happens. Right. But also Harriet Lorner specifically in the book of The Dance of Anger writes about-- It wasn't her formulation. It was another shrink whose name I can't remember. Maybe a couple shrinks. They came up with the concept of the triangle in relationships.

And once I saw that, I was like, oh my god, this book's divided in three. There are three hotels. And I thought, wow, talk about the anxiety of influence. It's like--

“This actually gets a question I was going to ask, which is, what else do we need to know about Ben Lorner?”

So we just talked about his mom, but who is he as an author? He's mentioned in the setup like the acclades he's received. Is there a background of Ben Lorner and his work that you think we should know before we perceive? I think of Ben Lorner as sort of the most successful author that many people I know haven't heard of, which says more about the current landscape of literature than it does about Lorner,

which is just that I think Lorner is among those who have read him. He is widely acknowledged as one of today's foremost practitioners of writing. But the kind of writing he does, I think, does not speak to every reader in that it's auto-fiction. It's very philosophical. It's very autofictional.

It's often experimental. I mean, there's a lot of this in this book. He is writing intellectually about the hazards of intellectualizing everything that it creates a distance from the real world. Being the Thomas, the father figure, the mentor in here does this to a fault, and his son Max complains. He uses his intellect as a defense, and the narrator says defense against what, and Max says reality.

Yeah, it's referential. It's educated. It's intellectual.

“However, I don't think he's snobby or pretentious, and that's part of why I think he's beloved.”

I completely agree. I think of him as I'm going to say, it's going to sound derogatory, but it's not. I think of him as great philosophical literary man, which some people may say. That's a derogatory thing where it sounds like I put down. But I just mean that there's a tone and an intellectual quality to his considerations.

But I think his characters are often bumbling and humorous ways.

There's always a disjuncture between the deluges or grandeur that his characters have,

versus how other people see them. That's definitely the case in a leaving a touch of station, and it's very funny. It's very funny. That's yeah. I should note that he started as a poet, and he remains a poet.

He really was a poet before he was a novelist, and leaving the touch of station, his debut,

through, again, through the intellect.

And so he's always got this, he's kind of teasing this through all of his work.

And that could excuse or at least explain the compression of a so-called novel, like transcription. That you mentioned the word compression, because to dive into this book, I have a silly first question. It is a question of compression.

If you had to give me one word to describe this book, to set up this book, to characterize how you feel about this book, just one word that comes to mind

“when you think of transcription, what would that word be?”

I'll start. My word is active. What popped into my head was envelope? [laughter] I feel like an inkblot test.

What about you? I would say destabilizing. Okay. So do I need to, does that have to be an adjective? Because I could be anything.

I wouldn't say enveloping. I just thought envelope. I wouldn't say envelope. I guess because an envelope is again, it's a bit of a triad, or a trip ticket, or a triangle.

So it's also an old-fashioned technology. It's a book about technology, or a technology's failures. And it's just, I don't know. I envelope that answer. Unexpected, but great.

Why not? Your word was destabilizing. My word was destabilizing, because he constantly undermines his own narrative. He sets you up to believe one thing, and then gives you a different view on that same thing. That makes you wonder what really happened.

It's not even clear to me having finished the book, whether the sun max is kind of, he's kind of a double of the narrator. He had to break down in college, but we know that so did the narrator. When you say destabilize, do you mean confused? Actually, with the moments when you just set a thought,

do I actually know what's going on here? There's a lot that happens in the gaps and only by implication in here. And he leaves the reader to do a lot of the work of trying to piece together.

A narrative that we can never be sure really happened.

“That's why I said, that's why I said destabilize it.”

At moments, I was like, "Hitchcock." It's not "Hitchcocky." But I was like, "Wow. Is this like vertigo or max?" And the narrator, the same person, is the sun, the mentor.

Is there a father, the mentor? You speak of triangles. And the narrator gives us a long flashback in the first section when he has broken up. With the woman who will become his wife, we know. And during that time that they're broken up,

her best friend kind of worms her way into his life. And then we find in the third section that Max, the sun was obsessed with that best friend for a time. And so it's maybe a love triangle going on there, too. Yeah.

I love this. It's like the careful novel making. Yeah. Careful. Like intricate details that you have to seek out and find.

Or maybe it's not careful. Maybe this is just a stream of consciousness. Yeah. No, no. Very careful.

Wait, when you say active, do you mean that we have to actively participate in the making of the story? And what I hope is a learning mode. I mean it in a variety of ways. I do mean it in that.

Like we have to actively participate. It's a very demanding book.

“You have to notice these careful small details.”

You have to parse out for yourself what's happening. This is not a book that you can just let sweep over you. I mean, I guess you could because for me, the individual stories were interesting, but like you have to be in it. But also I set active because I think the book is very active itself.

The book, the way the sections challenge each other, the way that they are destabilizing.

You're reading the first section and you're along for the ride.

Then you get to the second section and the moment he confesses, my interview was reconstructed. The moment there's that doubt, everything destabilizes, that changes the first section. You're reading the third section.

You're noticing these parallels. Like the book felt like it was doing many, many things. It was performing the type of uncertainty. It was performing the construct reality, the way the characters thinking about technology and mediation and the book seems to be performing that.

And the way and so I thought active in that way. The book is active and it demands that the reader be active. And the other woman I thought of writing the review immediately was Lillian Ross. The New Yorker writer and the reason I thought of her was because she famously or infamously did not use tape recorders for interview.

And she was considered this wonderful reporter. And I was fascinated by this because one of the things I don't miss about reporting, which I used to do much more of, is the anxiety over the tape recorder. But you got to have a tape recorder, especially these days,

because it's your backup.

And if you're challenged, if someone says I didn't say that,

“or it's like people don't believe it unless there's tape to back it up.”

So I was fascinated and talk about disabilized. I mean, I was a little bit retraumatized. So, you know, in that way, I would say also the book is maybe a little bit inside early in the sense of I'm curious to find out how it speaks to people outside the professions of journalism and education.

And he milks the malfunctioning iPhone for a bit of kind of slapstick comedy. He cannot bring himself to tell Thomas that it does not working. And he sets it down. And Thomas believes he is being recorded, but is not.

And then Ben Lerner in the third one,

Max, the son is recording Thomas without telling the news on that. Using his phone to record him. So there's this kind of-- It's really brilliant.

So I've heard some descriptors, spine tingling, brilliant. Now we've set up the book. We've talked about our words. We've talked about the themes.

I just want to know your response. Overall, did you like the book? Feel mixed about how did you approach the book? What was your reading experience? Like, just talk to me about your relationship to this book.

How did you feel? I liked it without loving it. It does hold you at a bit of a distance. I loved the Topeka School. And was part of the crowd at the book review,

lobbying for that to be one of our ten best books. This one, I admired, I was impressed. There were times I was really deeply behind it. But I came away feeling that it was-- It felt more like an exercise than a story that I could kind of fully get behind it.

Interesting. Tell me more. When I say an exercise, I was very aware of all the kind of balancing and doubling and those instabilities that engaged me intellectually without necessarily engaging me emotionally. The part that engaged me the most emotionally. And I suspect probably everybody when Max is monologueing in the third part

and talking about his daughter's struggles with eating. Suddenly, clicks in and becomes very pressing and urgent in a way. Yes. I can't sequential, right? There's a despair of this father who's not sure how to help his ailing daughter.

And yet is aware of the absurdity of modern life that this should be an issue at all. And that she would be suit into eating by watching unboxing videos. [laughter] And yet that part of the book is all told maybe 25 pages. It emotionally anchors the third part of it and clicks in fatherhood as a theme.

Obviously, Thomas and his relationship to Max and Thomas and his relationship to his mentee, who also has a daughter who is going through troubles. Again, raising the question of is Max the unnamed narrator. All this doubling that goes on makes fatherhood a theme.

But it's never, you never feel it emotionally except for this kind of chunk.

That's 25 pages or so. And so it was hard for me to kind of sink into. You didn't even feel it at the beginning where he's kind of stressing about his daughter. The narrator is stressing about his daughter who he needs to calm. I needed more than, I mean, he's stressing about it.

But it was too early and we didn't get enough detail so that I was not fully invested in that fair. So this is a book you likes, didn't love, admired, but it felt like an actress. I will say always happy to read Ben Learner.

“I think he's brilliant, not only intellectually, but I love his sentences.”

I think he's a great noticeer and a great thinker. He's a great observer of language. There's a time when he because his phone is broken and he's worried about his family. He's trying to call and check in. And he's wondering if the phrase unknown collar comes up.

And he says that always struck me as such a Victorian phrase.

Like, gentlemen, got you have a great unknown collar is great. I was super excited by how he centralized the phone and the novel to the point where the book is like a phone shaped thing in its slimness and size and everything. Because I feel like even here at the New York Times, there's a little too much sanctimony toward the phone. Like a kind of, you know, it puts all this responsibility on us as readers. And we're supposed to put our phones in the freezer.

And we're supposed to bug get the brick. We're supposed to get the app to make us stop looking at it. And I think it's time to acknowledge that the horse has left the book. It's not going away and it's part of our bodies now. And we need to understand and analyze what does it mean that we now have an external hard drive or a thumb drive to our brains.

“And I think Ben Learner in this exercise, which I completely agree with Greg that it has that feeling.”

And he's not looking at the phone as even though it breaks in part one, he's not looked. There's something he's acknowledging it's magic. What Virginia Hevernon called magic and loss, you know, it's like the magic and loss of the internet is fully present.

He's anxiety at not being able to meet walking there.

He wants to consult the map even though he knows the way perfectly. I don't know that. He's he's looking at the pictures on the wall and he's not engaging with them because he really wants to be checking his phone. And it's kind of about the way that the phone, he says I craved my cellular phone at the cell. It's really a level. I don't know what it was.

But you know, I really like the book. I mean, I'm just remembering it was that Thomas had a memory of one of his early memories was hearing Hitler on the radio rising in pitch. And I thought that was such an incredible detail. And I just thought we don't acknowledge enough the continuity of generations and how technology has shaped who we are and continues to shape who we are.

“And in fact, most of us, I think have elderly relatives who are phone heads, you know, they're playing candy crush or it's not all like put that thing away or whatever which which Thomas does in the book.”

But yeah, I know the Europe stuff. I don't know. It just, I just, I guess I felt the illusions became a little bit runaway for me. There was a lot of I got to go look this up, which is not bad.

And in fact, it's part of centralizing the phone perhaps is acknowledging that we always have a gigantic liberate our fingertips now.

But it, as it took as a reader it took me out, not in, not in the, not in it took me out, like it actually took me out. So it sounds like Greg, you were mentioning that it was the fatherhood aspect that really clicked in the third section. But didn't in the earlier section. So when you were talking about how you thought about it, you mentioned fatherhood quite a lot. Alexandra, you're mentioning technology quite a lot. How did you feel about the portrait of family, the portrait of fatherhood? That anxiety about children and the internet or children and yeah, the unboxing, the video that not letting kids worry not knowing nobody knows we don't know it's a huge experiment.

We don't know how much we don't know if the kids are going to be all right. It's more than big brother. It's totalizing the environment. And I, you know, I've had friends who who you want to just go back to wooden toys and not allow anything. And the schools are restricting the phones and it's a gigantic issue was I emotionally moved by the father's worry.

“I don't think so. I think I probably knew that daughter was going to be okay. I wasn't really surprised at how it was solved.”

It actually, it seemed like one of the many compromises we make all the time. One of the things I was thinking as you were speaking is I separated out the fatherhood and the technology. But as you were speaking as realizing, you can't because the consideration is like, how do you raise your child? How do you take care of your child? And as you were saying before, like it's technology is totally integrated into everything. In the book, you can't separate them out. And for purposes of this conversation, we can't either.

Yeah, I'm just even thinking of Mad Men and how we all last when, you know, Betty would say like the kids, the kids were just in front of that TV, you know, and we laughed at that. And Jeff, how do you feel about this book?

“I really love this book. I think I more than like it. I loved it. For me, I was emotionally invested in each of the three sections.”

I keep describing this book as cerebral and when talking about it, especially when I was writing up the announcement article for this book club, I was like, it's about existence technology. And I was saying these very large things at a certain point. I was like am I sounding a name? But that's because the book does get so philosophical and big and a way that I really liked. I liked that it was a cerebral book, but one of the things I admired is that as cerebral as it was, I personally thought very invested in the emotional stakes of each section.

And I love the slapsticky humor of the first section, not just when he's at Thomas's house, and he's trying to like disguise that he hasn't isn't recording, but like,

when he's in that hotel and he's just bumbling and he's running into the old fling of that stuff. There's something. Ben Learn is good at writing bumbling characters where it doesn't feel like they're obviously the butt of the joke, but you know, just watching these lost men and entertaining. So I was there for that. The middle section, so brief, so slim, but for me, it was like an electric jolt anytime you have the presence of doubt or that becomes an explicit consideration in a book. Because me, I'm like immediately, I want to do the searching, so I love that middle section, and then the heart was the third section.

Yeah, and we haven't even talked about COVID. Yeah, the COVID of it all, which is the this family in crisis and you're getting this portrait of that in a variety of ways, I loved. The thing that I love the overall is just the theme of how something so artificial can be meaningful real. That comes up again and again with the idea that it's not the literal transcription of the interview. It's a reconstructed interview, but that means something that is real in its way or the idea that

The fact that, I mean, it's just mainlining sugar. That's enough. That's good. I liked that consideration. And so all of the pieces for me were working. I loved this book, and it felt, it didn't feel detached. It felt very philosophical, but for me, one of the things I love about a Ben-Learner book is how he's able to make something so philosophical, and I feel like it's coming from a human, coming from a graphic story. That's not the only answer.

So those are my thoughts on the book. I want to hear more from you. I want to hear what you're interested in, but first, please take a quick break.

Hi, this is Ashley. I live in San Francisco with my boyfriend. We would love to officially share my near-time subscription with separate logins. We both love cooking, love being in the kitchen, but I'm a 30 minute and under-efficient, dinner girly. I want a sheet pan meal. He is very elaborate. He wants to get into the storytelling. I want to be able to save my easy meals and check off the ones that I've completed.

“And I think him having his own profile would be great.”

Ashley, we heard you. It's why we created the New York Times family subscription. You get your own login, and Mr. elaborate gets his. Plus room for two others. Find out more at nytimes.com/family. [Music] And we're back. This is the book review. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm with Gregg Coals and Alexander Jacobs, and we're discussing transcription by Ben Lerner. Before we jump back to our conversation, though, I wanted to read off some thoughts from our book club community.

Right now, we have an article up headlined book club, read transcription by Ben Lerner with the book review. Readers from all over are sharing the thoughts there, and here are a few comments that I loved. Marjorie from New York Rates. I found the section on Emmy's Eating Disorder, especially moving. It is ironic that Max is attempt to anger his father by buying Emmy a tablet, a merely rated her symptoms. Perhaps this suggests that loving parents can excessively control their children with negative consequences.

“I think Lerner is pointing out how identity is created by enumeral factors, including by our past,”

our ancestors, our environment, and chance. Marjorie continues, but then ends with, I love this novel. Jolten from Ohio Rates. I finished reading yesterday, and I'm still in a days.

What I found most amazing was how it's length-aided its power. I don't want to give anything away,

but there is a repeated line that I was able to quickly find in an earlier passage. And that moment of "scrolling" back and forth led to more "scrolling" and another level of meaning to the novel was unlocked. I have to believe that the length was an intentional choice, and further proof of Lerner's genius, a word I don't use lightly. And then we had a fun exchange with this reader Andrew. Andrew pointed out, "I like to think that Lerner has anticipated that many of us will be reading his book on our phones

and Googling unfamiliar names and acronyms." I flagged, personally, that I've read this on a Kindle first, and that was another layer of transcription, another layer of technological remove and Andrew responded saying, "Yes, and what about the audiobook?" And that case, the printed or virtual text, becomes a perfect transcription about the reader listener has experienced. I just liked this comment because it pointed out the infinity mirror aspect of novel and the book's considerations.

So those are just a few comments. Thank you to everyone for reading with us. And now, back to our conversation in the studio. I want to ask more about themes that you were focusing on, anything that you were excited to discuss. It's a mode that I call "free swim." What are you thinking about? Talk to me. I'm drowning. I'm drowning. I need a floaty.

This is a book I've talked about how fatherhood is a theme. Obviously, technology is a theme. We have not really talked about how memory and time are huge themes.

The very first paragraph of the book, the narrator, is facing backwards on the train,

and he says that his daughter calls that going back in time or moving backwards into times. It's something along those lines. And later, we get the same thought about a river. When you're going against the tide, it's kind of traveling backwards into time. There's a lot of traveling back into time in this book.

“And I think she phrases it as "I'm facing the past."”

There you go. This book faces the past in so many ways. It is about fatherhood, but it's also about childhood and about being a child in relation to a father.

I can't remember if it was on our book club article page.

Or if it was MJ on your Instagram page, a comment or where you talked about this book. Somebody said, "Love been learner, but isn't this just a book about men in their communication problem?" Yes.

“Totally. That's why Harriet Learner and the dance of anger are so important.”

Which, what do you feel about that? I feel like that reader is not entirely wrong. I mean, and that Ben Learner would say as much, that it is largely, I mean, because it's about technology and distraction and the way that we try to stop ourselves from being present in the moment and the way that we turn away from reality,

that men in their communication problem is very important to them. Which are considerable and so consequential. Yes. I have a communication problem. I'm going to make it everybody's trouble.

One could argue women not to stereotype the sexes,

but that there's an overcommunication perhaps. Sometimes they're an overthinking, possibly. I'm just venturing. Overthinking men overthink too, and that is very much to the point of this book. I mean, literally men would rather pretend to record an interview then.

Right.

“There's an amazing moment where Thomas overintellectualizes Max's wife, Adel, has had a cancer scare.”

And Max tells his father that, and his father's reaction is to expound on the word biopsy. Iosopsis. Ios means life, andopsis means light. No, and it's like the eating disorder called "ARFID." Now it's over with the acronym as we can look it up. But yeah, and he's thinking about that. He's thinking about all the crazy acronyms.

Actually, that "ARFID" moment is another moment. It's philosophical and just kind of a genius breaking down of language that Ben Leonard does, where he says, "You go to the doctor, describe the symptoms. They give you back those exact same symptoms, but now in technical terms. And you feel better about it, even though they don't know what causes it.

And I think he's making fun of ADHD. I personally enjoy because I think it's massively overdid now. But... That, though, gets at the pleasure component of it. It's such a thoughtful, cerebral meditation, but it's funny.

It's like you're poking fun.

I always think of for Ben Leonard the difference between what's happening in the book

and the characters and the authorial intelligence. He's not endorsing that overthinking. But as the book itself is performing that type of overthinking. Like, there's the complicated relationship to learn. In fact, he's criticizing it.

“I mean, that's what I said earlier about throughout his work.”

He is very intellectual criticism of over intellectualization. He can't help himself. I think that all the other thing I had thinking about and couldn't really resolve in this very tightly turned around review was mortality, or are they going back to the idea of technology

as an external hard drive of our bodies, or a thumb drive of our bodies, and actual thumb to our hands? What I think I felt that the book was sort of not so self-seriously, but it was looking at the idea of how can we extend our lifespans if can we actually live on, be it from Hitler's radio recordings, or a novel?

Or, but yeah, I mean, the book danced up to the idea. It's so interesting that Thomas doesn't die of COVID, and the child does not succumb to the eating disorder, which are things that happen. They didn't, but people do die.

Yes, exactly. So I guess if the book had, it's not a drawback, but the thing one of the things that made it feel exercising to me more than necessarily novelistic, and the traditional sense was that I felt like we were intellectually

teased with these concepts of death, without, you know, we weren't emotionally invested perhaps in. I'm going to throw that to you, Greg. How do you feel about death? Yeah, that's an interesting point.

Yeah, I know. Very scared of death. I don't know about you guys. When I made some death joke in a book review, and you're like, "I like my delusions."

How did you feel about that? What Alexander pointed out, the proposition of death as it looms in this book. Yeah, I thought the COVID stuff was very well handled, and played into the same destabilization that I felt.

He sets it up from the start. The narrator is wearing a mask on the train. He's not sure whether he should wear a mask in the hotel. We know that we're in the middle of COVID, and it's not until much later that we learn that Thomas gets COVID,

has he had COVID already when the narrator is getting there,

or is it something he gets after?

“Is the narrator maybe responsible for his getting COVID?”

We just know that Max has gone through this terrible COVID scare with his father Thomas. We also know from the first bit, if we know what dignity task is, we know that Thomas is considering the assisted suicide. He mentions dignity task.

The narrator doesn't know what it is. He thinks it might be a small museum in Europe somewhere, but if we know and Max and Thomas know, dignity task is the assisted suicide center in Switzerland, and so we know that Thomas is planning his end at 90,

and we don't learn how he dies, but we kind of assume that he takes himself out that way. Do you have big picture thoughts about the book? I do. I have been talking about it online a little bit,

but I have a unified theory of BenLearner that I would like to float by you and see what you think.

My theory about BenLearner is he is always trying to find,

throughout his books, the vanishing point of reality, of when reality ceases to be, because of a variety of reasons, but then also when it comes into existence. When something so deeply artificial can be real,

when a fact or a piece of information, supercharges what's in front of us and changes its meaning. And for this book club, I was going back and reading some of BenLearner's previous books. I had read Topeka School,

and then I read this, but I had it read a total of station, and I hadn't read 10 or 4. And in a total of station, as reading it for this podcast,

he mentions the law of the excluded middle. Do you know this? I don't know. I'm going to butcher it because I did not study philosophy or linguistics or logic,

but the law, as I understand it, the law of the excluded middle, is the idea that for any given proposition, a proposition is either true or it is not true. There's no middle.

And I feel like BenLearner's work is mining the middle. He's going to find where it's neither true or untrue. Yeah, or when something's so deeply fake, but still impactful and real. When an interview is constructed,

but that is the truth. And I feel like he's doing that with language. He's doing that with technology. That's my unified theory.

“I think that's a really good theory of BenLearner.”

He makes that point very overt in this book, in regard to those glass flowers that we mentioned. It's the famous glass flower collection at the Harvard Museum, at Harvard Natural History Museum, or in the basement there.

They've just got this giant collection of flowers and insects blown by a German father and son and shipped here very carefully. And this woman that I mentioned, the possible love triangle with Max and the narrator,

and this woman and Lisa takes the narrator in during college two of the basement of Harvard to see these flowers. And he has this moment of thinking that it's so close to being real and it's not real

and that's what makes it profound, and that it becomes a theory of art for him, and a theory of life for him, that guides him on nature hikes. He cannot appreciate the beauty of the mountains

unless he then thinks of somebody painting them. It's getting it almost right. And so that it's that slippage between reality and not reality that the middle that you're talking about, it's exactly what he's doing.

And this is why I love a BenLearner book, because that's such a complicated idea to distill and fiction, but then also it's just an interesting story. It's just an interesting story. So those are a few ideas.

We could talk about this book all day.

It's kind of incredible how much conversation can come from a 130 page book,

“but I think that's for me the genius of this book.”

We have book recommendations, but before we pivot to that, I have a question that I'm going to call, tell me one thing, tell me one takeaway, one thing that you want readers to absolutely know about this book.

Mine is a quote that I had, and it's the end of the first section, and it's just you call this fiction, but it is more. Yes, I think I put that in my review,

so it must have resonated with me as well. Is that our one thing? Yeah, I think that might be our one thing. My one advice to readers going through this is, you are not a reader who usually underlines or takes notes.

I mean, this is a book because it's so tricky and slippery, and there's so many instances of repetition, and kind of the undermining the destabilizing that I talked about at the beginning, underline and take notes because it will help you.

We'll help you.

Well, we've had our one book. We have a tip. We have a call. We've had our one book. We have a tip.

We have a call.

“We have a chiding, we have a chiding, and now we have recommendations”

because before we wrap up, I want to know what you would recommend, anyone who's finished transcription to read next. That could be for whatever reason, maybe it's another cerebral book about technology,

maybe it's another book about fathers and daughters, maybe it's another who knows. I will follow you, but I just want to know what book would you recommend readers pick up next. How many recommendations do I get?

Let's start with one as we go around, and then we'll do a lightning round at the end.

Okay, so first recommendation,

if this is a book that you loved is Patricia Lockwoods, no one here is talking about this, which is also very much a book about technology and how we live online, and then in its second half,

it shifts as this book does to a health crisis in a child, and that takes you immediately offline, and how we live in real life when there is a crisis upon us. That is an excellent recommendation,

“and it was a New York Times best book of, was it 2020?”

I was here for that, so I might be in 2020. Incredible. Well, I've already recommended both Lillian Ross's reporting and Harriet Learners, The Dance of Anger, which might supplement the slight absence of femininity

that has been acknowledged and felt in transcription, but I think I would also, the book that occurred to me, that was non-fiction, also non-fiction, the cellos by Nicholas Carr,

which was a Pulitzer finalist. I think around 2010, it's about how the internet is rewiring our brains. Just saying yeah, I don't know. Yeah, well, I think why I'm mentioning these three,

recommending these three books is that I think they're all really worthy, and maybe slightly forgotten or faded, and I love to resurrect like an artificial flower. Anyway, I love to bring up from the basement. You might say, "Bring up the bodies."

How about you, MJ? What do you reckon?

My first one is a book that came out last year,

University by Natasha Brown, which I'm recommending because it has that subsequent section undercuts what you thought came before. It opens with this account of a guy who is bludgeoned with a gold bar,

and talk about symbolism about how capitalism is getting down. He's bludgeoned by a gold bar, and you get this account. And then the second section is the story of the journalist who wrote the first section. You find out that the first section is actually a long magazine story,

and then you find out about the journalist. And when you're reading the first section, you're like, something about this telling feels weird. And you almost judge Natasha Brown a little bit, because you're like, "Why isn't this writing sharper?"

And then you realize, "Oh, wait, this is a trick. This is from this kind of struggling over her head journalist." And then this third section is the story of one of this conservative thinker who's on her way to a literary festival,

and she has a connection to the crime, and the fourth section is the panel conversation at the very first. It's a whole algorithmically related. Perfectly related.

It's really good.

“And I think it was long listed for the booker prize last year,”

but if you liked the structure of transcription, I think pick up universality, and I think universality is also challenging in a way that transcription is divisive. That's ideal to be a human algorithm.

The robots in my brain are telling me, "I joke as that robots that are controlling me. It's the microfastics in my brain."

So that's my first recommendation.

But Greg, you said, "You're a set-up maid. It's only getting many. I did have many. I mean, Ben Lerner often makes me think of Dandelilo, but then a lot of people do.

I'm a big Dandelilo fan, but the description of all the candy and sweets that they have in the house when the daughter is going through her eating disorder, just put me in mind of white noise,

and the consumer culture. And the unboxing videos that she watched, put me in mind of a lesser known Dandelilo novel called the Body Artist, which is also very much about kind of grief

and memory. It's this kind of weird obsession that the heroine of that novel, which early days of the internet, but she's obsessed with a webcam

that's been set up on a filming a street corner in Finland 24 hours. And she just goes there, and it kind of brings her out of her grief in the same way that these unboxing videos

was interesting the daughter out of her eating disorder. Oh, and we haven't even talked about Kofka. Yeah, let's bring Kofka to the horror audience.

Well, the hunger artist,

but wasn't there also another...

No, I can't remember.

“I think there was another Kofka connection”

that I can't remember the main page and later. I also wanted to mention Jennifer Egan and a visit from the Goonsquad, which has one of the great scenes of a celebrity interview gone

completely off the rails. And just to make their Lily and Ross reporting is many celebrity interviews. Yeah, go on. Do you have any other recommendations?

I think I'm tapped out. Okay. I will make one more recommendation. Greg, head ass. See, this is one book on our horror.

I'm ecstatic. Which in the same way that you recommended universality for the structure of it

and the way that it throws the first part

into question, that undermining thing. Anybody to say the same one? I say on three. One, two, three, eight. Right.

Right. Oh, yes. Trust is a good one. Tell me about asymmetry. A symmetry by Lisa Halliday

is the story of a woman's relationship with a very famous writer

“who bears a strong resemblance to Philip Roth”

and then the second part kind of undermines the telling of the first part.

Now, I'm getting competitive.

I might also recommend Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzinine" published in 1988. Also short, it's just very compact and proceeds all this technology. And I think it's in his voice, also,

which is about phone sex. I just think it's interesting to track the way technology has figured in novels over the past 40 years. I love this competition,

because this is a competition where everybody wins. Everyone gets so many book recommendations. I have a few that I wanted to mention, "Trust", which also subsequent secondndios. Herndias.

Herndias. I have a recommendation from a reader who was reading online with us.

“Ted from Rhode Island wrote in and said,”

"Red transcription right after a reread of Rachel Cusks outlined in the song as a similar effect. High-minded people, passing small moments, written elegantly and showcasing deep intellects.

It was a pleasure to read." I have to just imagine, let's bring Virginia new wolf into the room. Why not? Experiments and consciousness.

Yeah, consciousness is mediated through a variety of things, including the Great War. And that is unfortunately all the time. We have today Greg Alexandra, thank you for joining us.

Always a pleasure, MJ. Delighted to be here. I would even come back. Success. Success.

And thank you to everyone who read with us this month, and speaking of reading with us, the title of our June Book Club Pick. In June, we will be reading "Yesterday" by Carol Clareberg.

It's about a "Tradwife" who one day wakes up, and finds that she's been transported to 1855, the era and lifestyle that she's been emulating online. Is it time travel? Is it all a hoax or a prank?

Where is something else going on? Breathe with us and find out. Right now, there is up, an article headlined "Book Club" read "Yesterday" by Carol Clareberg with the book review.

Join the conversation there. We will also be discussing the book on the podcast "The Airs on June 26." We're excited to talk about this book with you and until then, have you reading?

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