The Transcriptionist: A Novel
*Starred Review* Lena may well be the last newspaper transcriptionist in America. She sits alone with a headset and a Dictaphone and transcribes every single word that has been recorded for the Record. Her life is as colorless as the room she works in—in a word, gray. The window of her office has not been open for three years, not since a transcriptionist opened it to see the body of a reporter who committed suicide by jumping to his death. Lena spends most of her timetranscribing long interviews that are incorporated into the newspaper’s stories, and even as she drowns in words, she believes in the power of language. Words, she thought, would save her; but, ironically, as she copies the words of others, she speaks to fewer and fewer people. Rowland, a former transcriptionist for the New York Times, has written a strange, mesmerizing novel about language, isolation, ethics, technology, and the lack of trust between institutions and the people they purportedly serve. It references Chaucer and the literary denizens of the Algonquin Hotel and recalls in its own idiosyncratic way Herman Melville’s equally enigmatic short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. A fine debut novel about the decline of newspapers and the subsequent loss of ­humanity—and yes, these are related. --June Sawyers