The Topeka School

The book has an unusual narrative structure. Each chapter is told from the perspective of either Adam, Adam’s father Jonathan, Adam’s mother Jane, or his schoolmate Darren (more about him later). We see vignettes of Adam growing up in Topeka, Kansas, scenes from his parents’ relationship, and snippets from the work his parents do at a Freudian psychiatric institute called The Foundation. The events do not play out in chronological order. Lerner is fluid and ambiguous with the order in which things happen. He will jump between time periods even within the same paragraph. This risks making the book feel discombobulated, but his style makes it work; he begins each chapter slowly, giving us time to orient ourselves in the time period and place of the scene, before picking up the cadence and moving into what I’ll call his high register. This is an effortless, psychological voice he adopts, often to express tensions and truths about language and language use. Our human capacity to switch into such a voice, where we appear to be capable of speaking in terms and truths without conscious perception, is described throughout the novel as a kind of glossolalia (an automatic speech act in an unknown language). This term equally describes Lerner’s writing when it shifts into high register.

These monologues were interesting - and they really are monologues, because Ben Lerner's voice haunts every character in this book - but interesting as they were, they were very abstract and disconnected from the actual narrative, like they were imposed on a story that wasn’t really about them. Lerner overuses the technique and squanders his high register on insignificant events. Frequent digressions make large swathes of the story feel irrelevant. His attempt to bring everything together is the final chapter wherein Adam - in the present day - attends a protest against ICE and family separations at the border. This chapter comes out of nowhere and it feels disconnected with everything else we’ve seen so far, most of which takes place in 90s Topeka. The name of the chapter is even called “thematic apperception” (“apperception” means “conscious perception”). Hiding behind these big words is Lerner thumping us over the head and telling us to pay attention, because this chapter is what the book is actually about. Really, it feels like he wrote himself into a corner, and the final chapter is a desperate attempt to link the story to the present day.

Lerner’s other stylistic weakness is his over-reliance on semi-colons and commas. Sometimes the impact is to overload the reader with information, other times it imparts a cheap sense of thriller-like tension. Often he will say/describe something, then repeat nearly the exact same thing inside the same sentence in the next clause, attaching it usually with a comma. For example, “As ever, his grandfather was dressed, had been dressed, in a kind of thin sweat suit…”; “I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a kind of simulated castration thing, an attempt not to be a boy, a man, one of the Men.” He does this so frequently it must be intentional, but I can’t work out its purpose. When Hemingway wrote, “small birds blew in the wind, and the wind turned their feathers”, he sharpens the image of the birds flying against the wind by bringing our mind to focus on what it’s doing to their feathers. When Ben Lerner does it, it just feels like he couldn’t think of the right phrase. Is he trying to make sure the reader understands what he has to say? Or is he attempting to mimic natural speech and the way we increasingly refine our understanding of something as we talk about it in more specific terms? Either way, I don’t think it works.

His most baffling narrative choice was the regular comparison of events in the novel with a short story called “A Man Named Ziegler” by Hermann Hesse. Was there actually a point to this? Hesse’s story is about a man who learns to communicate with animals and breaks down when he learns what they really think of him. It is a very short story with not much content to mine. It has vague connections with Lerner’s monologues on the power and mystery of language, and to a lesser extent the incommensurability of the two sides of a divided America. But these themes already feel like they were forced into the book, so the comparisons with Hesse come off heavy-handed and contrived.

Most of the chapters take the form of a character relating some events that happened to them. This makes the actual story feel like something that’s happening in the background. Summarising it is surprisingly challenging, but most of the narrative threads turn upon Adam. Adam (who is the author’s self-insert) is intelligent and physically strong. He sleeps with the hottest girl at school and parties with the popular kids in the affluent suburbs of west Topeka. Lerner goes to great lengths to show us that Adam is a fundamentally good person in every way. And while we see episodes of toxic masculinity, these are always in situations where he is protecting his mother, his girlfriend, or his daughter. Even if these actions are in bad judgement, they still demonstrate a courage and will that never actually exposes his character to moral scrutiny. He never unravels the way we see Darren unravel.

Darren's story is interleaved with that of Adam's family to supply us with a “genealogy of the alt-right”. It’s one of the major themes of the book: what actually causes someone to become a white supremacist, a Trump supporter, a homophobe? If we take Darren as the answer, it’s apparently: stupidity, mental disability, social awkwardness, ostracism, and a natural inclination to violence. It’s too much of an ad hominem to be a convincing portrait of Trumpism. While Darren’s story feels like it’s somehow the key to understanding the book, his pay-off - if it can even be called that - is a throwaway mention in the final chapter, in which we see him on the picket-line for the Westboro Baptist Church wearing a MAGA hat. He is protesting one of Adam’s poetry readings. I think what’s most significant about Darren is not that he represents Trumpism. What’s most significant is that he represents the opposite of whatever Adam is, because Adam is the author and the author has written himself into the story as a fundamentally good person.

Lerner can’t resist moralising and it ruins the best scenes in the book. To train for the national high school debate championships, Adam partners up with former Topeka High champion Evanson. These debates hinges on the “spread”, a technique wherein the aim is throw out as many superficial points as possible in an effort to confuse and overwhelm your opponents. If they forget to address a point - or run out of time - it is conceded, and the person who brought it up wins a point. This style-over-substance approach is likened to the state of national discourse in America. It’s a simple but effective metaphor, but Ben Lerner can’t help but repeat it over and over again, turning his astute comparison into something more like one of granddad's trite aphorisms.

As Adam and Evanson continue their lessons, debating back-and-forth in a hot room in the 90s, sharpening their technical and rhetorical skills at the expense of passion and truth, we see they represent the two sides of a divided America. But again, Lerner doesn’t have the self-control to let a powerful scene stand on its own. He diverges from the narrative to tell us that Evanson, in the future, helps engineer the most “disastrous” tax cuts ever seen in Kansas. Up to this point, Evanson is a slightly-slimey politician-type person, but he’s not fundamentally or unambiguously evil. He is a convincing mentor and rival to Adam. But Lerner can’t help breaking out of the scene to parenthetically condemn Evanson by equating him with Republican America. This reduces the scene to a caricature. The characters stop saying anything meaningful. They tear off their masks to reveal themselves as nothing more than mouthpieces for Ben Lerner.

One of the major subplots is the parents’ work at the Foundation, a Freudian psychiatric institute. Ironically, I think Lerner’s writing is guilty of narcissism: in the Freudian sense, narcissism is the conflation of subject with object, and we see this in the projection of the same narrative voice onto every main character. High-school Adam, present-day Adam, and Jonathan (his father) are indistinguishable. In one chapter I could not tell who was speaking; I assumed it was Adam until I flipped back to the beginning of the chapter and found out it was Jane. Other than this part of the book, Jane’s chapters were distinguishable from the others, but only because her chapters involved themes, characters, and subplots which were largely removed from the rest of the story. She feels like yet another mouthpiece for the author, this time to explore themes of success, inadequacy, and sexism. The result is that her subplots don’t really go anywhere.

Was the book attempting too much? We have a struggling marriage; anti-Semitism and the holocaust lurking in the background (which I haven't even talked about, but they're so tangential they strike me more as a cheap set-piece); homosexuality; psychiatry and Freudianism; marriage and relationships; jealousy; cultural appropriation (highschool Adam’s fancying himself as some kind of rapper-poet); sexism; the Trump administration; toxic masculinity; the national discourse; growing up in the Midwest; constant references to Hesse’s “A Man Named Ziegler”; and most importantly, the fundamental incommensurability of two Americas speaking different mythologies. Many of these threads are left dangling with no real pay-off. Lerner’s book obviously sees itself as a work that taps into and critiques the fabric of American society - it is very consciously a “Great American Novel” - but you don’t leave the book with any great insights. Fundamentally, it feels like a psychological novel trying to be a political novel. For those reasons, I don’t think it succeeds in its purpose.

Read this review on Substack.