RavePublic BooksBen Lerner’s absorbing new work of fiction, The Topeka School, extends the customary protections of anonymity to its characters. And yet the book conjures an intimacy that exceeds even Knausgaard’s confessional brutality. Most readers know by now that the author’s basic biographical details—son of psychotherapists, from Kansas, debater—are mirrored by those of the story’s protagonist, Adam, who has appeared elsewhere in his fiction. But even if I hadn’t known this, I would have felt the vague discomfort of violating someone’s most precious memories, the darkest fantasies of his unconscious mind. Reading The Topeka School, I felt as if I were eavesdropping on a stranger’s therapy. Yet this uncomfortable intimacy is, in some ways, the novel’s greatest gift. Because despite the book’s specificity in place and time—Kansas in the late 1990s—it is really America that is lying on the therapist’s couch ... The novel derives its considerable power from how Lerner weaves these memories together into a kind of analytic dissection of America’s psyche ... Far from jarring, this self-awareness becomes the novel’s thematic glue ... perhaps Lerner...teaches us to meld the universal and the particular, the political and the pathological, into one potent literary brew—perhaps that we may truly become, in the novel’s last words, \'a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.\'
