​Transcription by Ben Lerner is a novel centered around an enigmatic character, Thomas, as he is about to be interviewed, his death, and his involvement in his son and granddaughter’s life. The story starts off with one of his previous students gearing up to interview him, prepping in his hotel, dropping his phone in the sink, and losing the only recording device he will have for the interview with Thomas later. Though, for the interviewer, they’re able to partially reflect on their time in college and after with the moments surrounding Thomas, and then the circumstances in which he met his wife and had his own daughter. At Thomas’s place, because he’s in his 90’s, his mental facilities have slightly eroded, which make him start to think that his student may or not be his son. Even still, the interviewer isn’t able to use his phone so instead reconstructs the interview that is soon published. The second part of the novel follows immediately after the interviewer’s reveal of the published piece, in part being a fabricated conversation with Thomas, during Thomas’s memorial service. The interviewer doesn’t believe that he was in the wrong, though most of his collogues think different of him after. The final part is an extended interview with Thomas’s son, in part about Thomas being emotionally distant as a father, while also delving into his own struggles as a parent trying to get his daughter to eat.
 
Even though the novel is quite short, Lerner is able to pack a lot of emotional weight to the interviewer thinking about his own daughter or Thomas’s son feeling frustrated at his father. It is constructed somewhat unconventionally, and even while the majority of the novel is dialogue, it still feels like it speeds along. I think in part because it’s structured around Thomas’s death and that the interviews are describing events that happened.
 
The novel is very specifically a Covid story with the granddaughter doing school online, Thomas getting Covid and his call over FaceTime, and opening with the interviewer on the train with a mask. While I think that Covid is essential in the narrative, the novel already reads of its time even if it was published last month. I think what I mean is that because Covid—at least for the middle class—was a universally cushioned isolation its descriptions and discussions of Covid don’t feel fresh or unique. Of course, because it was a collective experience then these details don’t make anything particularly sticky. What is missing, which may be intentional, is the class of people who couldn’t get their groceries delivered to them—that in fact they were the ones delivering the groceries. I think this isn’t a particularity to Lerner’s novel, but this is more of my own skepticism of Covid narratives in general: they are middle or upper middle-class experiences that are softened by lower class struggle (and specifically that lower class struggle is barely mentioned). So, while Transcription is positioned in Covid time, and its narrative centers around Covid, its impact of Covid is aesthetic only. What I mean is that the only true impact that Covid could’ve had was Thomas’s intubation. Though, while Thomas is intubated, he doesn’t die. And for the purposes of the narrative, his intubation is required for his son to open up about his feelings. But in the narrative, it could’ve been any near-death event for Thomas’s son to talk openly.
 
Final Rating: 3.5/5

​Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford is a collection of interlinked short stories that follow the lives of a Native American family first in Oklahoma and then in Texas as they deal with skeletons in their closets. In some instances, they flee from wildfires, hunker down in cellars during tornadoes, or battle their own family history. One of the characters, Justine, gets pregnant while she is in high school with a man twice her age. And when her family finds out that she’s going to be a mother, Justine runs away at first and then returns to her family at church. This child is Reney who, somewhat aware of her mother’s early parenthood, lives recklessly, smoking in abandoned houses, running away with a boy, scoping out her father at the gas station. In the collection, I really enjoyed the first story, ‘Book of Generations’, which follows Justine’s pregnancy. Another story I was quite fond of was ‘Then Signs My Soul’ which is about a guy, Moses, who recently lost his mother. In the first week of his grieving, a pair of married women move in next door and help him care for his garden while he helps repair their house. The third story that I thought was really good was ‘Bonita’ which follows Justine and her partner as she weighs leaving him while a fire whips through Bonita. These stories feature generations of strong women, sometimes in the wrong, but always resilient.
 
Final Rating: 4/5

​Only Son by Kevin Moffett is a novel about a boy and then a man reckoning with his father’s death, raising a son without a template, and the tenuous relationship he has with his aging mother. The first part follows the speaker in the days and years after his father’s death when he is nine. He attends karate lessons by a sensei who teaches kids with dead fathers, he sells things door to door from a magazine catalogue, he takes a trip to his aunt and grandmothers in Kentucky (going from Florida) to visit his father’s old room. The novel then pushes forward as the speaker is a father himself, watching his son grow up, observing and loving him in ways he thinks is right. At the moment, he’s a writing professor at a college in LA where he feels all his students are detached from his teachings. He takes his son, by that time a pre-teen, to skateparks and tries to become the role model he never had. Then, after receiving a gray notebook with his own father’s documentation of a journey from LA to San Francisco, he decides to follow in his father’s footsteps. His wife convinces his son to join him on the journey, acting as a final trip between the two before his son goes off to college. It’s during the trip the father begins to see how his son has pulled away from him. The father’s mother calls at times to talk about her new love affair, or the cactus she walked into at night, though the whole time, the father is somewhat cold to her while his son is the opposite. It’s not until they’re in San Francisco and it’s the last night when his son decides to go to a very fancy sushi restaurant. While there, he calls his grandmother to rate and rag on the food. It’s a moment where the father notes, “…it occurs to me that my experience of this meal is secondary to his, a feeling some parents must have all the time, and one I’ve had before but never this acutely.” It sums up how during the raising of his son, his focus hadn’t always been on his son.
 
Moffett has crafted a story that feels so propulsive in its language, it’s almost closer to a very long prose poem. It approaches its subject matter sometimes lightheartedly, sometimes serious, but always providing gut-punching lines. The novel crystalizes into a father’s realization of the way he loves and treats his son, and how that’s been put on the backseat when the grief of his own father towers above him. A truly powerful read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5