It is a rarity to read a book where our everyday devices, starring an iPhone, and now-mundane habits, referring to FaceTime calls, weave through the relationships, including the characters’ perceptions of and reflections on them, and still enjoy it. Reading to calm the mind, to feel like someone else (or many of the elses within that time span), to be in an environment that is not yours, and, of course, not to check your phone; to avoid scrolling, sending a message, or checking that thing you wondered about earlier but were too distracted to pursue; and then to find your book playing with these contemporary, now inevitable, essential or inevitably essential, toys and not be irritated by it is a form of joy.

I love the fact that Ben Lerner’s Transcription was centred around care: caring for, caring about, being cared for and cared about, caregiving, and the desires around being the recipient of it. I love that the protagonists were male and, in fact, fathers, and that father-child and child-father relationships were at the heart of this book. From having a distant relationship with his father to managing to develop an involved one with his own child; from not being an involved father figure but becoming a mentor to many of others’ children; the need for communication, the loneliness, the confusion, the loss of memory and the effort to capture and preserve it, the never-ending, almost desperate need for parental approval, recognition, acceptance, and forgiveness were masterfully worked through in this rather small book.

Link to the book: granta.com/products/tra…