PositiveThe Harvard Crimson...[a] kaleidoscopic and often brilliant inquiry into the power of language in American society ... In some ways, The Topeka School is Lerner’s most conventional work. Yet in others, it pushes his struggle with authentic expression further than ever before ... while The Topeka School may be autofiction, it is not autobiography. On the contrary, the novel is full of instances where language fails to represent reality, where it falls silent or swells with disturbing power, dragging content behind its form ... Parts of Lerner’s novel may chafe readers. When he constructs a chapter around a Herman Hesse short story, some may find Lerner pretentious; and when he attacks Donald Trump and toxic masculinity, some may find him too topical, too current. But the strength of Lerner’s novel is the way it undertakes a task it acknowledges to be impossible: the salvage of a Whitmanesque \'we\' from our polluted national language ... Like John Ashbery, Lerner is peering through the convex mirror of our discourse, but still writing — writing towards a truer language on its other side.
