MixedBOMBAt the height of its power, Lerner’s work crystallizes the sensation of networked life as a kind of inter-reference where the boundaries between language and reality bend and blur. The question before Lerner, then, in his formidable third novel, is how to bring this futurist aesthetic into alignment with a story of the past ... It’s in the successive rounds of the national debate tournament that a recurring motif in Lerner’s work surfaces at its strongest: a vision of language as something material, constitutive, embedded in reality; a substance at the point of exchange between subject and object. It’s also these moments in which The Topeka School feels most vitally like a \'story\' in the conventional sense ... [Darren\'s] brief, Faulknerian intercuts amount to Lerner’s most earnest attempt to reach beyond the inherent solipsism (or, in this case, nepotism) at the heart of autofiction, into the more utopian novelistic ambitions enshrined within the liberal imagination: to bridge irreconcilable psychologies, classes, ideologies; to create a more perfect union. That they’re also some of the novel’s weakest sections—stylistically inert, competent in a bare, dramatic sense—suggests a more profound conceptual function that remains, nevertheless, merely academic.
...in Darren, we sense an urge Lerner can neither resist nor totally assimilate, an urge to make that much more what it already is: a novel for the age of Trump ... Where The Topeka School excels, instead, is in those moments of passionate belief in which we glimpse beliefs of our own; in its witness to the possibility of art and politics in its earliest days, to the ecstasy of inter-reference that can elapse in the lifetime between this moment and the one still to come, the one in which each of us is given a name.
Mark Fisher
PositiveBOMB\"In the book K-Punk, we find an archaeology of Fisher’s relationship to networks, and his efforts to interpret and exist within them ... With the emergence of this collection, that electrochemical chain of flesh and information, the always-becoming that Mark Fisher is and was, takes its most profound leap into the real world. In K-Punk, he is born again.\
