Topeka School (Lerner)

The Topeka School 
Ben Lerner, 2019
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374277789 


Summary
A tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right.

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world.

Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak.

Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity.

It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1979
• Where—Topeka, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—Believer Book Award; Terry Southern Prize
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Ben Lerner has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.

He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration [and] a ventriloquist’s vocal range .… I could say more—about trauma, sex, paradox, magic—but only at the cost of further reducing this irreducible novel, which seeks instead to spread its readers beyond their borders with its fertile intelligence and its even more abundant heart.
Garth Risk Hallberg - New York Times Book Review


[Lerner is] one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world…. [The Topeka School] is not just a bildungsroman… but a polyphonic portrait of an entire community…. Lerner can get away with writing so many books that are autofictional because a spirit speaks through him—because his language takes on a life of its own.
Becca Rothfeld - Wall Street Journal


An extraordinarily brilliant novel that’s also accessible to anyone yearning for illumination in our disputatious era…. Through the wizardry of Lerner’s prose, this battle of adolescent elocution becomes an emblem for the fiery state of American culture…. Among the myriad miracles of The Topeka School is that it accomplishes so much, captures so much and questions so much about America in fewer than 300 pages.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


Lerner is a dazzlingly intelligent writer, and for anyone looking to understand contemporary America this tale of toxic masculinity, resentful outcasts, rigged high-school debates and political disaster is a good place to start.
Times (UK)


A triumph of ventriloquism…. [Lerner] has written a perfectly weighted, hugely intelligent, entirely entertaining novel that does more than simply mine his childhood or explore what it is to be an author; he has taken on American masculinity, group identity and marginalization, political messaging and generational exchange, and has done so not didactically but generously and with admirable sensitivity."
Times Literary Supplement (UK)


[The Topeka School] is thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary…. It's funny, and at times, painfully acute…. [Lerner] is a supremely gifted prose stylist, at once theoretical and conversational; he never bores or blathers, and is always limpid. Rather than inviting the reader to look at him or his life, he invites the reader to look through him.
Christine Smallwood - Harper's


Autofiction master Lerner returns with his most expansive novel to date.… Narration from the present-day and interludes hinting at a terrible tragedy add intrigue to this study of polarization and toxic masculinity.
Entertainment Weekly


Loosely plotted but riveting, this novel expertly locates the thread of the anxious present in the memory-stippled past.
Publishers Weekly


[T]his book reintroduces Adam Gordon, narrator of Lerner's…  Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam's youth in Topeka, KS, is unveiled,… Readers seeking the wry humor… will find it in short supply here. This exploration of the angst-filled road to manhood is recommended for fans of Jonathan Franzen.  —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal


(Starred review) Engrossing…. Few writers are so deeply engaged as Lerner in how our interior selves are shaped by memory and consequence…. Autofiction at its smartest and most effective: self-interested, self-interrogating, but never self-involved.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the novel’s first scene, Adam gives a speech to his high school girlfriend, Amber, without realizing that she’s disappeared (7). Later, Amber recounts abandoning her stepfather’s dinnertime polemic without his noticing (13). What kinds of speaking, and listening, do the two stories introduce? How do they reflect conditions of gender and power?

2. Who are the primary voices in the book? Why does the perspective shift between first, second, and third person? How does the italicized, untitled format of Darren’s sections distinguish him from the other characters, and what is the effect of his voice being set apart in this way?

3. The novel serves as "a genealogy of [Adam’s] speech, its theaters and extremes" (142). How are different kinds of speech—including talk therapy, competitive debate, and political discourse—rehearsed and performed in the book?

4. Recalling his affair with Sima, Jonathan says: "Maybe I was a man who sought substitute mothers, then left them like my father" (172). What does the book reveal about parents and children? What do Adam and Jane’s recitations of "The Purple Cow" suggest about the ability to disrupt intergenerational patterns?

5. As Jane describes her fraught public conversation with Sima, she states: "I was both on that stage and back in Brooklyn in the fifties; I was very briefly on the train" (105). Why do several timelines converge in this instance? What genres of time exist in the book?

6. How does Jane recover the memory of her father’s abuse? Why might the book refrain from explicitly portraying the scene on the train?

7. The young Adam "wanted to be a poet because poems were spells" (126).  Elsewhere, he experiences the "abstract capacity" of language through freestyle rap, a cultural appropriation of hip hop that also contains "pure possibility" (256). What qualities distinguish poetry from freestyle? What other verbal expressions contain the potential for magic? For oppression?

8. Like Adam, Ben Lerner is a poet from Topeka whose mother is a renowned psychologist and author. In the novel, the adult Adam explicitly wonders: "Why does it feel dangerous to fictionalize my daughters’ names?" (265). How does the book disturb distinctions between fact and fiction?

9. Different technologies mediate the voice: strangers harass Jane via landline; Jonathan records speech-shadowed passages of Sportsmanlike Driving (45); Jane directs the distraught Adam to the safety of a payphone (182); and the trio encounters Adam’s grandfather’s voice through Jonathan’s cassette player (239). How does technology shape the listener’s ability to intercept and alter speech? How do these moments underline the novel’s historical concerns?

10. The title introduces school as a primary setting. What are some of the schools featured, both literal and figurative? How do instruction and indoctrination take place?

11. Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, opens in a museum as Adam Gordon witnesses another visitor’s emotional breakdown, potentially caused by "a profound experience of art." In what ways do visual art and artifice, including Rose’s pilfered painting, Jonathan’s visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Duccio’s Madonna and Child, operate in The Topeka School?

12. How does race inflect the novel, from Adam’s freestyle—"a crisis in white masculinity"(127)—to Jason’s recognition of his "ethnic difference" following the September 11 attacks (120), to Jonathan’s memories of his Taipei upbringing? What is the relationship between whiteness and violence?

13. The novel bridges various settings: Jonathan and Jane’s New York, Klaus’ Europe, Adam’s forecasted return to the "vaguely imagined East Coast city from which [his] experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony" (15). How does tension exist between and within places? Does Topeka become a city of "milieu therapy" (54)?

14. The text makes a number of overt and implicit political references: the former senator Bob Dole’s face appears on a stranger’s television screen (12) and Donald Trump’s remarks about his daughter surface during the playground altercation between Adam and another father (270). How do personal stories—of the Gordon family, of Darren’s act of violence—acknowledge or reflect the political landscape of the past and present? How do these strains collide, such as when the adult Adam encounters Darren "wearing a red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence" (275)?

15. Does the motif of "the spread" complicate the transcendent possibilities of language? What questions does the novel pose about language’s ability to convey meaning in our contemporary moment? Does the book "spread" its readers with a surplus of allusions, materials, perspectives, and timelines?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)