...exhilarating ... The Topeka School rocks an American amplitude, ranging freely from parenthood to childhood, from toxic masculinity to the niceties of cunnilingus ... the earlier novels’ questions about art and authenticity not only persist; they stretch to fill the horizon. The cumulative effect of The Topeka School's departures, then, is of arrival: at urgency, at scale. Adam’s faithlessness can no longer be written off as cosmopolitan neurosis. It is instead a symptom of a national crisis of belief ... Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration, a ventriloquist’s vocal range and a fine ethnographic attunement. Never before, though, has the latter been so joyously indulged, or the bubblicious texture of late Clintonism been so lovingly evoked ... Lerner has unearthed here an ingenious metaphor for the effects of winner-take-all late capitalism — not just debate and hip-hop, but on race and sexuality and language itself. At times, the novel pushes these connections harder than they will bear, but a timely universality emerges from what otherwise might have been a nostalgic coming-of-age story ... The Topeka School's alternating narrators can bring us into wonderful intimacy with internal contradictions, where they exist, but the novel as a whole wants to transcend these limits of perspective ... 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.
... awe-inspiring ... Lerner has hit on something deep, and true, in the portrait of 'debate' in this book, as what it has long seemed to be—the knightly combat or martial arts of children of the professional-managerial class, where they can practice the linguistic violence they’ll use as adults against real targets in politics, the law, and administration ... The beautiful recollections of childhood in The Topeka School allow for a Portrait of the Artist–type origin story in which Adam’s eventual triumph as a poet, and as the writer of this novel, occurs by the neutralization of the voices of debate and white rap with his mother’s feminism ... The Darren plot seems a way to lend a convention of suspense, familiar from other contemporary novels, to a book that is better than most contemporary novels. Perhaps its virtue is as a reminder of the persistence of exclusion in a progressive civilization—our own—which redeems some new subjects only to despise and scapegoat others.
The Topeka School is the best novel of the Donald Trump era thus far—in no small part because it isn’t much interested in Trump. Rather, it investigates the weird and twisty relationships between Trump’s political context and the state of American language ... some lines in The Topeka School are as fine as any he’s written ... The Topeka School continues this project of redefining identity as a collection of many versions of oneself scattered throughout time. What’s changed is Lerner’s scope ... The Topeka School succeeds, in part, by rejecting uncomplicated constructions of blame or causality ... There’s room to hope that this isn’t, in fact, the end of history, and that things spread out might be called back in again. Maybe the most remarkable thing about The Topeka School is the way it models this possibility by gathering together the apparently distant and unrelated ... sincere and generous.
...thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary ... funny, and at times, painfully acute. A bildungsroman in lyric chorus, it looks back on the past with affection but without nostalgia, and lands in the frighteningly unsure coda of the present day ... manages, in its particularity, to tell a story that is emblematic of American life ... Lerner seems to reinvent the novel as a happy side effect of some other project ... He 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 ... It is a testament to Lerner’s immense skill as a storyteller that his novels that double as essays and flicker like poems are also as frictionless as any classic work of nineteenth-century realism, easily reeling the reader in to their worlds, which display, in modernist style, all the seams ... Lerner is a genius of self-consciousness in all its senses—the thinking mind, the ambivalent attachment, the awkward social performance
The Topeka School weaves a masterful narrative of the impact that mental illness, misogyny, homophobia, politics, and religion have on children who want to be men ... though The Topeka School is heavily steeped in mid-90’s American liberalism and home phone lines, Lerner plots history with a contemporary eye to reconcile where we were then with where we stand now. It’s rare to find a book that is simultaneously searing in its social critique and so lush in its prose that it verges on poetry.
Fans of Ben Lerner will be shocked to discover in the first pages of The Topeka School that Lerner can write action ... At the same time as these particulars illuminate individual characters, they, like so many of the novel’s images and references, recur, reverberate, and bleed into each other (sometimes to excess), coming to stand for a more generalized experience ... Ultimately, these repetitions feed into the novel’s incisive anatomization of what it means not just to be Adam, but to be a white male in America ... We are no longer the kind of America where we can speak of The Great American Novel. We are too fractured, too fraught. But we can still speak of great American novels: novels that give voice to our fractures and fraughtness, that display our multitudes or inhabit one of the specificities within those multitudes. In this context, Lerner has written an occasionally overdetermined but nevertheless pretty darn great American novel, framed, for sure, by his own decidedly specific experience, but so is America, for all of us.
[Lerner's] least embarrassed and most ambitious ... For the first time, he narrates from perspectives other than his own ... Mr. Lerner too was a high-school debate champion, and he sometimes writes as if he still wants to score political points. At times, he spoils the vivid picture of masculinity he has constructed by theorizing it for us: I lost track of the number of times the word 'masculinity' appears directly in the text. Mr. Lerner’s other novels are pristine, but The Topeka School is looser and messier, in large part because it is so frantic to project its social virtues ... Still, Mr. Lerner’s prose is too rich to stoop to sanctimony for long. Sometimes, when Adam is debating, his words accelerate until they seem to speak themselves. Embarrassment becomes irrelevant: Every phrase acquires the weight of necessity ... Mr. 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. He manages to shed himself when he marshals enough empathy and eloquence to imagine the worlds of others.
... beautifully, exasperatingly, transcendently wordy ... trains the reader’s eye on the dramas and dangers of being a person—or a nation—enthralled, bombarded, and imprisoned by rhetoric ... [women] exist here as men’s linguistic and emotional foils. The working class, too, seems mostly tangential ... Race goes largely unexplored ... Lerner seems interested in reiterating via the details of his own biography the now-evident political reality that these alienated men are powerful and dangerous precisely when they feel they are not ... In America, Lerner reminds us, you can sound like an idiot all you want, but if you master the spread, you rule.
The Topeka School seems to hold up Darren and Adam as two different models of masculinity, one abased and the other exemplary, rather than sustain a more nuanced and generous critique of both...This is not to say that Lerner fails to depict or consider Adam’s own outbursts of masculine rage, but when they do erupt, the broader moral structure of the scenes can be taken to partially justify them .... Adam struggles with his masculinity, yes—but ultimately, he means well, and mostly, behaves well. He’s a good man. Darren, meanwhile—even with the compassion the novel affords him—embodies misogyny’s ugliness come to its full fruition. The novel is a meditation on and critique of masculinity, yet its central male psyche emerges relatively unscathed. ... Does this really constitute a reckoning? The Topeka Schoolis, like the novels that preceded it, an intelligent, unsettling inquiry that doubles as a self-referential aesthetic edifice. It’s also a true linguistic adventure, especially in the moments when Lerner allows his precise, circumspect prose to collapse into the lyricism of intermingled vocabularies—a mode he has mostly set aside since he turned from poetry to novel-writing. Yet the novel falls short of the task it sets itself. Here Lerner finds a form that generatively complicates his essayistic style of autofiction—expanding its capacity to speak politically and historically—but which also allows him to let the self at the novel’s center off the hook, tempering the achievement. Ambition outpaces courage.
Ben 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.'
The Topeka School is so different in tone, so unabashed in its conventionality — and even geometric in plot — that it can read like a critique of Lerner’s previous work. Gone is the archness and detachment; the formal, furrowed sentences with their fondness for oddly technical language ... Gone too is the interest in solipsism; for the first time we see Lerner the novelist embody the perspectives and voices of other characters, which he does with ease — in fact, the sections devoted to Adam’s parents, and the blurriness of their professional and sexual lives at their psychiatric institute...are the book’s most textured and unforced sections. There is no rush to judgment of these characters, even at their cruelest or most cowardly. By comparison, Adam and Darren, positioned as a man and his shadow self, are thin constructions. There is a feeling in this book, new and unpleasant in my reading of Lerner, of being frog-marched toward a thesis ... There is a real richness, however, in regarding Lerner’s three books together, as the story of a kind of political maturation.
... one may be forgiven for thinking Lerner is trying to make up for his implied shortcomings in prose. So much so that reading The Topeka School feels like being thrust into a graduate seminar on grand literary theory. For the most part, it’s as engrossing as can be ... Strictly on its own terms—as formal innovation driving a relatively static present by imbuing it with a deep past—The Topeka School mostly succeeds. Lerner’s method has a fair bit of madness, but it’s all about the relationship between language and what it has the power to conjure. The narrative shifts from first- to second- to third-person with surprising smoothness ... On occasion, the interpretative possibilities are remarkably unsubtle ... If the parallels creak, Lerner has a scaffolding rich enough to avoid hamminess, more so than in his previous novels ... But something is getting in the way of how good this novel really is. The Topeka School, a novel being released now, in October of 2019, bears a sales pitch and has elicited a critical response so familiar that it casts a pall over Lerner’s craft. The novel has been marketed and praised as a product of that exhausting trope—'fiction for our times'. Such weighty expectations deeply affect how a reader approaches the novel ... Lerner has not pulled off some grand historical response to America in 2019. The men in The Topeka School may be a familiar amalgam of disaffection and privilege, but Jane, the character least connected to some overarching narrative of the white American today, isn’t as easy. That it is this free-wheeling, second-guessing, instinctual character who ends up walking away with the whole book through sheer emotional heft, seems like a rebuke to the idea that any novel published in Trump’s America can be sufficiently 'timely.'
... brilliant ... The importance of speech in the novel lets Lerner comment on the state of politics, from glancing references to some people’s inability to decode irrational arguments to more direct critiques ... 'How do you keep other voices from becoming yours?' is a key question of our time, or, for that matter, any era. The Topeka School provides no clear answers, but it memorably demonstrates how hard it can be to recognize insidious utterances for what they are.
Lerner is brilliant, and his novels resemble doctored and polished transcripts of his mind’s inner workings ... Lerner’s political commentary weighs heavier in Topeka School than it does in his other novels ... The Topeka School is a technical masterwork. As always, Lerner’s prose is electric. His ambitious shifts in perspective, tense, and time are flawlessly executed, particularly when you consider the relatively straightforward approaches he took to his first two novels. It feels as though Lerner has been training for this moment his entire career ... Even masterworks have their flaws, however, and Topeka’s is overreach. Lerner’s insistence upon interrupting the perfect magic of his fiction to say the words 'Donald Trump,' or their equivalents, feels unnecessary ... Lerner doesn’t need to interrupt himself; he’s already saying everything he needs to say ... The Topeka School is an utter delight that will stand the test of time.
The Topeka School is preoccupied with the role of language in what we have come to call 'toxic masculinity,' presenting various situations in which men refuse communication, or retreat to corrupt pseudo-communication ('masculine gibberish') instead of making an authentic attempt to bridge the gap with others ... in its focus on the corruption of public speech, The Topeka School is a timely book, very occasionally marred by the author’s wish to underline this timeliness ... It’s perhaps forgivable (what writer hasn’t got the smug tones of the current president stuck in their mind?), but it smacks of anxiety, the worry that perhaps the overloaded contemporary reader will need direction ... Lerner’s audacious ventriloquizing of his own parents extends autofictional invention in ways it would be tempting to describe as oedipal, were it not done with such evident sympathy and affection.
At 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.
... there is something deeper, more sincere and radical at play here. This is a state-of-the-nation novel ... Lerner makes a powerful link between the violence of young white men and the state of politics ... this is a great novel, one summoned by the desperate times in which it was written ... Lerner has indeed grown up and he has created a work of extraordinary intelligence and subtlety, of lasting importance. The Topeka School is the sound of 'a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread'.
...[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.
As a novelist, [Lerner] is not only a natural, he’s also one of the best writers working today ... a tender, extended portrait of two good parents, a rarity in literature ... The non-linear structure produces narrative lacunae that powerfully enhance our understanding of character and event. The different voices are done simply and subtly. No crass ventriloquism here. Complex ideas are packed like alveoli in the lungs, creating an internal surface area much greater than you’d expect from 304 pages. But there’s always plenty of oxygen: everything feels breezy and effortless despite Lerner’s unbridled intellect ... What can’t he do?...he’s fearsomely articulate, but when it comes to description, 'a rain of glass' is the best he manages. (That said, his prose is always clean and cliché-free.)
... Lerner’s finest work yet, most strikingly in terms of style and form. His experience as a poet has always shined in the writing, but The Topeka School is more unified in its design and execution than any of his past novels ... well-read, erudite perspectives, ekphrastic writing, and smart characters with deep interiority ... He’s able to render scenes from his life with perfect emotional or artistic reality, instead of the one we inhabit daily. What I admire in Lerner’s work — and autofiction in general — is the authenticity and frankness of emotional experience and perception. Like a meditation, I found this effect carried beyond even the confines of the covers. After finishing the book, the walk through my neighborhood felt like a glimpse into a brighter and more clear world ... Lerner knows the line between sincerity and cliché. That said, he will directly refer to the callback he’s attempting to make, which at times comes across a bit too heavy handed, in stark relief to the nuance of the novel otherwise ... In trying to diagnose the culture of masculinity that both Adam and Darren exist in, the closeness to it might be off-putting to some readers ... Yet, the entire novel feels like a carefully reasoned rebuttal even to it’s own central project ... some of the strongest work being done in the medium. The Topeka School represents a sort of stylistic peak for Lerner — I only hope he can keep it up.
Before long the novel reveals itself: It’s not a book set in Kansas, but against it. It is not a book that a Kansan would want to read, it is a book for New Yorkers who want to think they understand the red states ... This Kansas is instantly identifiable as red state culture, an easy mix of stereotypes of the uneducated, the working class, and the bigoted. What Lerner eliminates are the inconvenient details ... Darren is not allowed to narrate his own thoughts; somehow, despite being mostly illiterate, the narration of his sections sounds a lot like Adam’s ... But how could someone like Darren speak for himself? He is only a representative of the horde. He is not an individual but a tragic archetype running headlong into his red-capped fate ... With his novel and his media positioning, Lerner was well-placed to deliver up red state culture as source material for the entertainment of the cultural elite, which he then legitimated with extra-novel commentary. What was lost was any sense that there might be a market for artistic work that comes from and speaks to fly-over country.
The Topeka School is, if not his best, certainly his most novelistic novel yet. Unlike its predecessors, which were essentially interior monologues delivered by characters with voices all but indistinguishable from Lerner’s ... Unlike his first two fiction works, which both seemed to be trying to evade the history of the bourgeois novel, The Topeka School flirts with a half-dozen traditional novelistic genres at once. The Topeka School is a family saga, and it’s a historical novel, scrupulous about the surface details of the summer of 1996 ... It's a regional novel ... It's a bildungsroman ... It is even, in its own way, a tale of suspense, suffused with dramatic tension and the threat of violence. At this juncture in Lerner’s career, the traditionalism of The Topeka School is far more surprising than its avant-gardism. The book finds Lerner at a crossroads, tempted by the conventions of the novel even as he continues to insist on the priority of the poetic ... Lerner tell[s] us a larger story about human life in the age of late capitalism, an era defined by a mode of production that standardizes experience ... As elsewhere in Lerner’s work, an anticapitalist rhetoric indebted to critical theory is wedded to a lyricism that finds an eerie beauty in what it negates, like a black light ... As a prose performance, The Topeka School is an unqualified success. It proves that Lerner, without sacrificing the idiosyncratic charms of his earlier books, can do more things with the novel form than we thought he could and perhaps more than he thought he wanted to. As a piece of urgent social critique—which The Topeka School, his most overtly political novel, also aspires to be—the results are more mixed ... The sections of The Topeka School chronicling Adam’s debate career...are rich in realistic detail, but they’re also the novel’s most tendentious. It’s the one area where Lerner consistently overreaches, attempting to transform his own extracurricular activities into an improbable allegory for the decline of American public discourse ... By embedding a utopian faith in poetry within the bourgeois compromise of the novel, Lerner makes his most compelling case yet for poetry. Which is perhaps why it’s a good thing that he keeps on deciding to write fiction, whatever his poet friends may think.
...The Topeka School is one white male’s attempt to consider how white men, as the dominant power in this country, brought us to this current moment of 'toxic masculinity,' the catchall explanation for male violence and misogyny. This hot-button topic is examined with authentic intellectual interrogation. The Topeka School delves into the male aspect much more than race, which some may read as a failure to acknowledge an intersectional identity. But it hones the novel’s focus. Lerner, with his poet’s eye for the strengths and fallibility of language, is precise and prismatic in his investigations ... The chapters narrated by Gordon’s mother, Jane, a famous feminist author, much like Lerner’s real mother, are a revelation ... The diffuse quality of the book’s events can be frustrating at the start, when Lerner is laying out his touchstones that haven’t yet paid off. But once they accrue their power, the specificity of setting and character all coalesce to make an uncanny and gripping read.
... discursive, inconclusive, and cerebral ... Without sacrificing any intellectual or linguistic prowess, the novel bodes clear narrative arcs and a protagonist transformation ... Lerner deftly traces the connection between our disintegrated political discourse and white male rage. Without judgment, he examines how American men find misplaced targets (e.g., women, people of color, immigrants, etc.) for this rage. Yet amazingly, Lerner does not demonize or other these men. Instead, he looks inward, analyzing Adam’s conditioned masculinity as a vehicle to understand the ways in which white American men embrace power—as enraged politicians or school shooters or serial sexual assaulters. But, as Lerner’s past work proves, self-reflection and intellectual extrapolation can only go so far ... a stunning narrative display of humanity and intellectual insight, a work of virtuosity written by a generationally gifted writer. It’s Lerner’s best novel yet.
The peculiarly uncomprehending nature of teenagehood is a model that suits The Topeka School, as does its partial setting in the Clinton years, a time that, in retrospect, has the shape of the wild, unknowing adolescence that presaged the defective maturity of the American present ... will be treated as a book of the moment, articulating the distinctive contemporary panic around authenticity, what it means to believe politicians and one another. Most of the responses to this novel will likely speak about its portrayal of toxic masculinity and account of the origins of current political language – the particular way it has become unmoored from truth ... what the novel does, through its concern for the present, is show that America has long been anxious about authenticity, and that these problems that seem particularly modern and distinctive are in fact spread wide across cultural and temporal planes, their symptoms and consequences ubiquitous ... By pointing outside the bounds of the novel, to other texts, other incidents, acknowledging a book the reader has encountered, Lerner elegantly conjures the residue of literary memory, a formal recognition of community, of the fact that the reader is a person in the world, his world ... Lerner is particularly skilled at writing about art ... in Lerner’s novel the poetic possibilities of speech and writing are exhilarating ... If you find that you are able to put aside your suspicions of a certain kind of contemporary literature as strategy, as self-reflexive performance, you will discover, in this novel, new ways of speaking that refer to old ways of being, existing high above the cities and in the tangled depths of your anxieties about what others think and what they see.
Lerner’s first two works of fiction were intelligent novels of ideas about characters who were more or less like him: disaffected, overeducated young men. What saved them from self-indulgence was their sentence-by-sentence virtuosity, their imaginative density, and the fact that the cleverness of his prose always felt appropriate to the stories he told ... Much of this is recognisable in The Topeka School ... But it is also a more earnest and sentimental novel than [Lerner's] previous books, which often sought to reconcile authenticity with postmodernist posturing by invoking a kind of ironic indeterminacy. The Topeka School – as dazzling as anything Lerner has written – is also his most successful effort at navigating between communal experience (the shared tropes, ideologies and cliches of a culture) and individual feeling (the specificities and textures of poetic expression) without denaturing either.
Ben Lerner...discards the riveting first-person immediacy of his previous novels for a more wide-ranging approach in The Topeka School, to mixed results ... The Topeka School interrogates toxic masculinity and the erosion of political discourse with a level of brilliance fans of Lerner should be familiar with ... Lerner’s careful frame keeps the story largely stuck in its ’90s setting, but the telling is intently, clearly contemporary. Thus the author searingly and precisely links the dawning of the Clinton years to the terrors of the Trump era ... But with so many points to hit — Bob Dole, the Westboro Baptist Church, and Donald Trump all get ample space here — Lerner’s ferociously singular prose doesn’t carry as much power ... there is the sense that Lerner is straining to scale up the impact of this novel, to make explicit the thread that weaves his disparate threads into an explosive, politically relevant, male-dominated whole ... The Topeka School doesn’t quite get there. But perhaps, as a broader meta-commentary on fiction of the Trump presidency, it’s dismayingly effective, too: a reminder that, no matter how sharp a critique you construct, you’ll find yourself fighting on his ground in the end.
Here Lerner uses the trappings of fiction to see his youth as an anthropologist (or ghost) might—from a critical distance, or, as one character puts it, from both 'first person and third.' This impulse sometimes saps the plot's momentum—Lerner can be reflexively reflective, more interested in analyzing motivations than dramatizing them. How many times can a novelist use the phrase 'libidinal economy' before we lose a feeling for their characters? ... At its best, though, The Topeka School is a kind of 21st-century The Sound and the Fury—a kaleidoscopic portrait that masterfully connects one family and its traumas to wider cultural dysfunction. Toxic masculinity—in the forms of privilege, sexual abuse, infidelity, casual violence—shapes each character, even those who 'process' feelings for a living ... Lerner's novel offers a compelling exploration of how we got here, and where we might go.
Interrogating the ability of the novel to reflect the chaos of human experience, Lerner asks the reader to surrender expectations of closure, as they enter the lives of characters whose wounds will not easily heal. At the same time, he offers a kind of hope ... Lerner unobtrusively assembles their individual experiences across time and geography to construct a convincing picture of a world distorted by dishonesty and unrestrained power .... The equation of individual failures with the broad collapse of social structures is not new in literature, but Lerner brings sharply incisive language and insights to prove how devastating this relation can be. He is unsparing in suggesting connections between the distortions of reality which Adam sees all around him, and the daily assault on the truth which now characterize public communication ... teaches how life leaves scars and how fragile self-constructed identities may be ... worth the ride.
What Lerner is projecting is a kind of doubling: between genres, yes, but more essentially between what we might call the inner and the outer life. The Topeka School is deeply autobiographical but also deeply imagined, a construction that reveals its frames and crossbeams, its slats and braces and joins. It is a book of tellings and retellings, in which perspectives enlarge or contradict one another, highlighting patterns that, by turns, illuminate and efface memory.
The structuring throughout is brilliantly done: the main chapters are standalone episodes, or mini-memoirs, which reverberate against each other thematically rather than chronologically, opening up yet more fertile spaces for the reader ... In some ways, The Topeka School is a satisfyingly simple family story, a creative unfolding of the relationships between two parents and their son, and the worlds that have formed these characters ... If one of many miracles is the way in which its proliferation of ideas are held in place, entwined, made to reinforce one another...then this exhilarating feeling of composed artistic plenty stands in contrast to the preoccupation with uncontrolled babble coursing through the novel ... Lerner isn’t just offering a weary postmodern jeu d’esprit, shruggingly embracing the meaninglessness of it all. For the apprehension of nonsense, of unreason disguised as reason, is as central to the book’s political diagnosis as it is to its artistic purpose: unreason linked to violence, bad words to bad deeds ... I think Lerner gets the balance just right. He 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.
The obsession humming under the well-wrought, perfectly paced, at times riveting scenes about family and art and memory, etc. is the troubling (to say the least) rise in power of the man-child, the Large Adult Son, and his penchant for violence and tyranny ... It's altered autobiography in drag as third-person narration in drag as multiple-POV first-person narration.
Aside from being just kind of cool and wonderfully destabilizing, and aside from displaying the difficulty of ever truly jettisoning the ego in fiction, and aside from offering a form of collective speech that might combat the rhetorical tools corrupt politicians use to gain power, the perspective play accurately reflects the experience of living ... The most enjoyable parts of Lerner's books for me are his academic close readings of pedestrian situations ... The Topeka School is crawling with...insights, and they remind you that you're dealing with a literary genius whose books make you feel like your brain and heart are growing with every sentence.
The Topeka School (think New York School, or don’t) is more than a confession, an excuse, a romp, a holiday; it uses what has come from Lerner’s earlier experiments in autofiction – the unexpected contact that can arise out of it, the questioning of art and sex and political engagement – to think about who gets to speak and what language will even allow us to say ... There are many things in The Topeka School that are more eloquent than words: a look, a smell of sandalwood and rain, a pool ball thrown hard in a girl’s face, an unfaithful husband’s hand finding his wife’s, cunnilingus, the burnt frame edge of a Renaissance Madonna and Child, chalk hearts on government pavements, a small boy sitting on the top of the slide and thumping his booted feet against the metal, silence. It is so common for language to be outwitted in the novel, and yet for the undoing to occur in beautiful sentences ... Say language is debased beyond usefulness and no magic pills are available: what is there to do? ... Lerner doesn’t just tear down the curtain between the writer and reader, as in his previous books, but allows the reader to flicker between the first and third person, to see a boy’s sentimental education as dynamic, resolving one inherited trauma, repeating another, and making new ones of his own to visit on his daughters ... each time I write a sentence, I have a shot at finding that space between what has gone before and what I can do. The nice thing about Ben Lerner is that he identifies the space, shows us how it works, what can be said there, how it can be said, and then he humbly sends in a man-child to make it all look less like the aesthetic and philosophical feat it actually is.
Greatness, Ben Lerner has decided, must not be approached lightly. His two previous novels...were fizzy, ironic jeux d’esprits. Lerner never stopped rolling his eyes at himself even as he frolicked in the prismatic spume of postmodern self-indulgence — 10:04 is the funniest novel about writing a novel you’ll read. But the new book is serious. It has themes. Big ones: Trump, toxic masculinity, the nature of human speech.
The Topeka School is anxious to become a great American novel ... The book is elegant, readable and delightfully clever, but it is filled with anxiety. It’s a novel with a knot in its stomach. In the early funny books Lerner could laugh away his self-consciousness, his niggling worries about why anyone would bother writing a novel at all ... Lerner worries away at his themes, willing them fretfully into life. A little laughter might have helped this serious, pleather-clad tome get closer to the greatness it so anxiously yearns for.
In The Topeka School, a majority of adult characters are psychologists, but even those who are not possess an analyst’s outsized belief in the power of language. Throughout the book, Lerner uses the thematic apperception test as one of his many refrain ... The book is full of exercises in language losing meaning, some more intentional than others ... Even though the story is replete with such value clashes—acid trips and marital infidelity and recovered trauma and white suburban teenagers in freestyle battles—The Topeka School comes to its climax tamely with a linguistic concession ... The novel may end on a hopeful note—the human microphone, a collective rather than confrontational speech act—but it is by no means a resolved note.
... the center doesn’t quite hold...Darren’s arc is almost anticlimatic ... it is difficult to maintain the momentum going backward, split up as it is, and additionally it verges on exploitative, or perhaps too obvious, to make Darren — a mentally disabled teenager so disturbed that he often hides in bushes by a park — a foil for Adam, the debate champion. Deflating what would conventionally be a point of convergence is all too fitting for The Topeka School’s historical scope, however. It should be a comfort that no one’s life is completely determined by any one moment, if for no other reason than because nothing is actually a climax in the scope of history.
... its irony is profound rather than merely satirical ... In a novel so concerned with who has the right to be heard, it is a fruitful irony that much of the story is narrated not by Adam himself but by Jonathan and Jane, in alternating monologues. In a sense, this is a generous gesture, since Adam is surrendering his domination over the story ... These stories enrich the scope of the novel, allowing us to see what autobiographical novelists often forget—that theirs is not the only story taking place, that parents’ lives can be as complex and conflicted as their children’s. Yet in the end, inevitably, it is only Lerner whose words we are reading, raising the question of whether literary ventriloquism may itself be just a form of 'spreading'—a way of crowding out other voices ... Lerner, it seems to me, is less interesting as a political novelist than as an imaginative stylist. The politics that are implied in The Topeka School are admirable, but they will be familiar to most readers and writers of literary fiction. (When was the last time you read a novel in favor of toxic masculinity?) What Lerner does that few other novelists can takes place on the level of language. He wrote several books of poetry before turning to fiction, and the texture and organization of his fiction is essentially poetic ... a kind of writing that is self-consciously literary and intellectual, sometimes to the point of being precious, but that also has a thrilling imaginative vigor. By fusing therapeutic monologue, allusive poetry, critical theory, and social commentary, Lerner has turned a familiar genre—the adult writer revisiting his painful high school days—into something genuinely new.
... somewhere between what Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections might have been – a subtle exhumation of American dysfunction – and the intellectual pirouettes of Ben Marcus’s The Flame Alphabet, a novel of intellectual integrity and deep concern for words and their meaning(s) ... Structurally, the novel is pleasingly intricate ... manages the kind of moral empathy that a novel requires, despite being awfully 'literary'. Everyone is found wanting and nobody is judged. Or we are left in the morass of making our own judgements. Although I found the ending wanting, this is a serious book for serious times.
... a funny, penetrating book about language, politics and masculinity that acts as both a prequel and a sequel to [Lerner's] other autofiction ... certainly a bracingly different kind of fiction, one that dares to be loose, essayistic and extravagantly wordy ... Some scenes drag on and the story about Darren feels vague (I wasn’t convinced by Adam’s complicity in his violence — a thin device for suspense). But there’s so much going on: connections everywhere, layers of irony, several narrative procedures running concurrently ... Above all, it is fascinated with the possibilities and plasticity of language: talking therapy, policy debate and rapping all ferociously scrutinised. What stops it from being dry is Lerner’s wit, his eye for period detail (whether it’s Bob Dole or Eminem) and his poet’s ear for sounds (the distant whistle of a Union Pacific train or the beeps and hisses of a dial-up modem). Lerner never shies away from emotional or intellectual complications. If anything, he feeds on them.
The stories of the characters in The Topeka School are told with a pace that seems rhetorically frenetic. Long sentences, psychological implications, and rapid thought processes reflect the intellectual and introspective viewpoints of the characters ... Quiet anger permeates the book.
...[Lerner] combines the autofictional (Lerner’s parents were psychologists at the Menninger clinic in Topeka, where he grew up) and the metafictional with exceptional dexterity ... unlike its predecessors, which were both narrated in the first person, The Topeka School occupies multiple points of view...This gives it an expansiveness that, for all their qualities, the earlier books lacked. is a Bildungsroman, therefore, a portrait of the poet as a young man — albeit one couched in an idiom that is distinctively Lerner’s ... Adam’s preoccupation with the linguistic dimension of the problem of other minds, the recognition that language is the 'fundamental medium of sociality', is an enduring motif of the novel.
... seems a conscious attempt to expand the purview of [Lerner's] own brand of autofiction. In one sense, the novel’s polyphony, which incorporates the voices of Adam’s parents, is a way of allowing autofictional tropes to reenter the narrative...But perhaps more importantly, it’s also plumbly in line with Lerner’s muse-like interest in Whitman, whose transcendent democratic vision and co-opting of voices is central to the mission of The Topeka School and its investigations of ;bad forms of collectivity' ... loves to make connections, to spell things out, but Lerner often pulls up short when it comes to interpreting the Midwest itself ... The anxieties of the Whitmanian mission—of achieving a sense of community through the writtenness of the world—turn out to be intractably twined with the anxieties of autofiction itself. Can autofiction effectively represent the Midwest? Lerner’s answer, as best as it can be made out, would seem to be a qualified yes—qualified because the Midwest-as-subject fractures, like a jutting iceberg, the narrator-centric unity of a traditional autofictional work ... The emptiness and expansion of the Midwest, so allusively touched on, produce an anxiety of cohesion that, undealt with, leads to the book’s few flaws. It’s undoubtedly responsible for the book’s awkward sociological bent, for instance. It’s why the subplot about Darren—a lost boy whose italicized tale of growing rage bookends each of the novel’s sections and is meant to unify the text’s investigations of white male rage—feels tangential and tacked-on. It’s also, most likely, why the book feels the need to make such a grandly etiological gesture, as though Lerner were making up for the lack of some more subtle cohesion. It’s not, in the end, that autofiction fails when confronted with the Midwest. It’s just that there are, unmistakably, signs of stumbling.
Ben Lerner’s third and strongest novel to date ... There are many kinds of speech (political, public and private, freestyle, etc.) and succulent language textures on nearly every page. Lerner, a poet himself, shows he is not only a master wordsmith, but a skilled architect of plot in the debate scenes. Adam’s takedowns of his opponents are as riveting as any Federer-Nadal tennis match ... Darren is the least convincing character. He is a grab bag of easy associations for a high-school outcast with dark leanings...Elsewhere, Lerner deploys language with such concision — and is so exacting with his character’s interiority — that using video games as a metaphor is unimaginative and flattens Darren into a stereotype ... Initially, the thinly veiled family drama seems to merely be a clever device for exploring issues like toxic masculinity and the degradation of debate, but Lerner’s characters are so layered, so full, that they cannot all be dismissed as puppets to commentary. That said, there are certainly parts of the novel where the temptation proves too great to comment on contemporary politics or to plant a symbol for psychoanalysis ... These moments are usually marked by heavy-handed exposition and, while they do elevate the narrative, they also stretch it thin and cause the plot to lose momentum.
The messy relationship between masculinity and language drives this seeking, eloquent story by poet-novelist Lerner ... The ekphrastic style and autofictional tendencies echo Lerner’s earlier works, and his focus on language games and their discontents fits nicely within the 1990s setting. But the fear at the core of this tale—that language, no matter how thoroughly mastered or artfully presented, simply isn’t enough—feels new and urgent.
...in the October 2012 issue of Harper’s, Ben Lerner reflected on his past as a high school policy debate champion ... the crux of Lerner’s argument is recycled in his third novel, The Topeka School, which is, like 'Contest of Words,' largely concerned with the physical act of speaking out loud. Much of the essay’s language is even reused in the novel’s first chapter ... The Topeka School is also about language’s limits. Toward the end of the book, the style begins to change as Lerner describes Adam’s final speech and debate tournament while he rides the wave of the spoken word, the physical version of automatic writing. Words channel through him. It’s a pleasure to read ... But if Lerner is comfortable exploring the different political potentialities of speech, he is less adept at making sense of the contemporary political landscape more broadly ... Lerner’s understanding of what has led to our present predicament is caught up in the reductive narratives of mainstream liberal media ... Despite nearly a decade of distance and transformative political upheaval, Lerner ends The Topeka School in nearly the exact same way ... History is happening in real time, but Lerner has not caught up.
But where Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 are characterised by a transcendent delicacy of thought and impression, The Topeka School is weighed down by a dense, linguistically clichéd gospel of ‘privilege’, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’. At times it can feel like an audit of contemporary grievances ... Here men are almost uniformly oblivious, insecure, quick to rage, narcissistic and adulterous ... a ‘pre-history of the present’. But it’s a long way from the 1990s to Trump, and I’m not convinced the route runs through the claustrophobic therapy sessions of (mostly) middle-class graduates and their kids, even if they are in crossover country. Ironically, Lerner’s depiction of public speech tips into a populism Trump might recognise — one that has shadowy elites deceiving the common man through cunning abuse of language ... Lerner’s own deeply associative prose reaches a poetic pitch; a kaleidoscope of images, memories and phrases. He also remains uniquely good at conveying the energy of emerging intimacy, the moment things quietly yet fundamentally change ... But something has been lost, as Lerner’s chisel is swapped for the buzzword bludgeon. For that very reason The Topeka School will be described as ‘timely’. But unlike the classic-in-waiting 10:04, while it’s of its time, it will struggle to transcend it.
Lerner...is not just interested in creating the illusion but in drawing our attention to the process of creating literary illusion, which he does especially beautifully through the character of Adam’s mother ... Adam and Darren are the only Topeka boys to speak. The ordinary, not-strange, much-worried-about Midwestern boys, the kind that make up most of Adam’s crew and Jonathan’s clientele, stay silent: it’s striking that we don’t hear them, or even see them up close very much. ... In our current state of skepticism, it may be that any kind of omniscience feels like condescension, and for Adam—or Lerner—to inhabit the minds of ordinary young townsfolk would have been to dabble in Kansas kitsch. But to leave the Topekans out of The Topeka School means that the city, as a distinctive place rather than a multivalent symbol or private proving ground, effectively drops out of the book, and the better part of the social drops out of the social novel.
With his latest, [Lerner] leaves behind his typically erudite first-person protagonists in favor of a Kansas boyhood in the 1990s ... Lerner’s greatest strength lies in interstitial period details in the zeitgeist: Bob Dole, Reverend Fred Phelps, and Tupac Shakur. Loosely plotted but riveting, this novel expertly locates the thread of the anxious present in the memory-stippled past.
...[an] essayistic and engrossing novel ... The book sensitively gathers up the evidence of abuse, violation, and cruelty in Adam’s life.Though the conflicts are often modest...Lerner convincingly argues they're worth intense scrutiny ... Few writers are so deeply engaged as Lerner in how our interior selves are shaped by memory and consequence ...increasingly powerful and heartbreaking ... Autofiction at its smartest and most effective: self-interested, self-interrogating, but never self-involved.
... a portrait of the artist as a young, white, privileged man ... a more ambitious work of imaginative projection...It’s also weightier, less amorphous: autofiction grounded in irreducible personal experience, but trained, like a social novel, on a contemporary problem ... Lerner depicts an ennui rooted in plenitude and the collapse of meaning – a cultural din approaching escape velocity toward David Foster Wallace’s 'total noise' ... But amid Lerner’s forensic accounting of Adam’s presumptions...Topeka feels overwrought, pushing a teleology towards Trump ... In this frequently virtuosic novel, we glimpse the seam between the human-constructed world and the abyss beyond. No less than rules invoked by a uniformed goon, however, Topeka is an artefact. It is about America in 2019 but, brimming with self-awareness, it is also of it.
The dust jacket says the novel is about toxic masculinity, but this seems too simple and reductive, too buzzwordy a way to describe such a complicated work. Yes, manhood and manliness and masculinity and all the maladies innate to such constructed gender norms are integral to the story, but The Topeka School is, in a deeper sense, also about language, about the menace and mendacity of which language is capable. It’s about the precariousness of communication. Lerner extrapolates the innate violence of language, its dangers, the brutality lurking within the beauty of words, but also how these same words can express love, assuage anxiety, provide comfort in a moment of need. (Lerner writes with great compassion. This is a political novel, but not a cynical novel.) ... The debate sections...are among the most fluid and enthralling prose writing Lerner has ever done. While not as poetic or rarefied as in 10:04...the writing here is just as emotional and alive, the prejudices of the present informing the depiction of the past ... The novel is a portrait of a family, of a place, of a time that, fragile and fleeting, will lead to the imbroglio in which we presently find ourselves. Without pontificating or succumbing to the allure of performative wokeness, Lerner writes earnest, empathetic political prose. He posits no answers—he can’t even find ways to articulate his questions, sometimes. But not knowing is part of life, and part of The Topeka School.
Ben Lerner again walks the outer edges of prose form and perspective in his third novel ... well-wrought, perfectly paced, at times riveting ... It's altered autobiography in drag as third-person narration in drag as multiple-POV first-person narration ... Aside from being just kind of cool and wonderfully destabilizing, and aside from displaying the difficulty of ever truly jettisoning the ego in fiction, and aside from offering a form of collective speech that might combat the rhetorical tools corrupt politicians use to gain power, the perspective play accurately reflects the experience of living ... The diction here is less erudite than it is in Lerner's other books. This keeps the psychoanalytical meditations moving at a good clip and helps Lerner's lyrical sequences—runs of quick sentences at the end of some paragraphs that unite many of the themes in the book like little linguistic super-cuts—hit harder ... The Topeka School is crawling with similar insights, and they remind you that you're dealing with a literary genius whose books make you feel like your brain and heart are growing with every sentence.
