The Topeka School A Novel

Disorienting and brilliant storytelling that follows a family of intellectuals in Topeka, KS. The protagonist is a precocious debate champion that moonlights as a party-going teen contemplating life out of the midwest. His story is sandwiched between chapters from his psychologist parents' POV and life stories. Insecurity is rampant - emotional, sexual, intellectual - along with infidelity, aging, masculinity and memory. The chapter flow between narrative and stream of consciousness during senior year 1997 with brief interludes in the past and future. Personal and intimate while being social perceptive and poignant about the harm of "manliness", the language shines throughout.

Wonderful.

The Topeka School is a novel about language and its limits; about stories we tell privately and more widely (within families or as a society); and about the act of narrating a novel. It also happens to be a moving portrait of a family and possibly the most powerful reckoning with contemporary America that I've come across. Lerner arrives at a loosely plotted family saga by examining various arenas of speech—formal debate, talk therapy, freestyling, political doublespeak—and the circumstances (often crises) in which speech breaks down ("glossolalia" and "drivel" appear frequently). But it is as much a self-conscious account of writing a novel about language as it is a novel about Lerner's family. Phrases recur in the mouths of different characters; the author addresses the reader with asides about narrative choices. Most thrillingly, like in the standout chapter "The New York School (Jonathan)", different timelines overlap or interchange as narrators struggle to muster language that encompasses lived experience as it mingles with memory. It sounds like a postmodern experiment, but it's really a conventional novel. The text doesn't enact the linguistic slippages and breakdowns that its narrators discuss; all of the action is narrated from a comfortable distance of 20 or so years. Why does the novel feel so profound? Maybe simply because our president is incapable of speaking in complete sentences. This is the terror that overhangs The Topeka School—terror of what lies beyond language when language no longer refers to anything concrete in the public sphere. But there's something inherently hopeful in being reminded of language's ordering, affirmative power when used purposefully. Lerner and his stand-in, Adam Gordon, have found this power in debate and poetry; others might find it in novels like this one.

While there are flashes of brilliance that keep this novel from being a total slog, Lerner's writing style was alienating and often focused too long on the least interesting parts of the narrative. Would have dug this infinitely more had the focus solely been on Adam and Darren and how their upbringings led them to two very different futures. Probably would have dnf'd if i hadn't been doing it as an audiobook.

Interesting concept. It succeeds at incapsulating a complex snapshot of being a cis white male in Western culture via jumping around into various characters at various points in their lives, giving more context than I would say is typical for toxic masculinity. The problem I had with it was that it became very hard to connect with each character as it jumps around. While there are a few stand out moments, I never really grew to be more than a third party observer of these various people and events. And the prose style actually doesn’t help much with that problem. Sometimes it is intimate, sometimes meandering, always feeling a bit transient. The overall feeling I’m left with is that it does what it aims to do but isn’t quite cohesive enough beyond the goal to have exceeded my expectations. Was worth a read though. Especially if you’re a white cis male, I think the more books approaching toxic masculinity, the better.

3.5 stars. This book started out strong with an arresting opening. It soon included too many themes to keep a sharp focus (a form of spreading as it were). By the end, it felt like the novel was trying to fit as much as possible into the last few pages that I found it lost its rhythm. That said, there’s some brilliant moments in this book and it includes some important takedowns of toxic masculinity, white fragility, living in a Trumpian era, and what it means to be a man.

"He tasted the sugary gloss and tobacco, the hints of mint and metal that made him when he kissed her think of blood. It was good to be inflicting optional damage on your bright pink lungs, it was good to be two young people tasting of Lancôme and Philip Morris, synthetic pheromones and carcinogens, to be at the point of their most intimate contact, their most interchangeable, corporate persons, cliches, types." I haven't really read this book, I've dived into it and let myself being submerged in the language. It was not as important for me to know what really happened to the protagonists as I just wanted to keep savoring the richness and decadence of this poetry of a novel. I have a thing for language and this autofiction story by Ben Lerner makes it one of its main characters. The way we use it, how we weaponize it, how, in certain circumstances, it completely bankrupts and we stand baffled, with our arms by our sides, not able to communicate (that great scene at the playground). In Lerner's world, when the words are rendered useless, there comes the violence, mindless, and primal like an incomprehensible scream. The violence of the system and violence of all the horrible teenage boys, whose mothers told them to behave well and who can't really find their way to masculinity. Because masculinity and adulthood in modern America is a bankrupted concept anyway... There is just so much good here. Take a deep breath and start reading. [I'm also reviewing books on my Instagram account: @slowgram_cph]