In the interest of full disclosure The Topeka School is the first Ben Lerner novel that I have read. I appreciate Lerner's descriptive writing as the prose has a lot of poetic qualities; however this book did not do it for me. The storyline, focusing on 17 year old Adam during the 1996 election, and his two brilliant parents, was plot-heavy and told from many different perspectives. It was somewhat laborious and while the novel is honing in on toxic masculinity and the uprising of the alt-right culture some of the point got lost among the extraneous details.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

This is one of those books where the story is fabulous, but the execution and writing style aren't my cup of tea. I appreciate what the author is doing here, but the text is packed solid to the point that there is very little dialogue, and this paired with continuous thoughts that felt like mental run-on sentences, was a struggle. Again, I may not be high brow enough or as much of a literary fiction connoisseur as the reader who this novel is intended for, so I would definitely recommend with caution.

I've tried Ben Lerner before and thought maybe it just wasn't the right book for me. Now I'm thinking maybe he's just not the right author for me. With each section, the plot seems on the verge of really getting started, and then we are thrown back into a new character and learning all their eccentricities and starting over again. I only got half way in this book before I had to quit. I just couldn't make it.

This is a riveting, if at times challenging, novel about a family in Topeka, Kansas, in the last quarter of twentieth century. The parents work for a renowned psychology training institute/mental health hospital they call The Foundation and they have a smart and often angry son named Adam. The novel is divided into chapters between Adam, Jane (his mother), and Jonathan (the father), where the main story unspools. There is also an account at the ends of these chapters of a fourth, an outcast named Darren, who bears most of the torment his classmates pile on him.

While this is an insular family saga, it's also a chilling social commentary, a deep exploration of the limits of language to express existential discord and looming systems collapse. The tenets of psychoanalysis rule the inner workings of The Foundation, friendships are formed and broken on the backs of confessions made during long analysis sessions, and troubled youth are pulled in for counseling, All this leads to a targeted indictment of politics, systems, and child rearing practices from the 1990s to the current day.

The Topkea Schools manages weave together distinct voices, science, sociology, economic systems, misogyny, and dread. We end up caring deeply for the characters but hurting for our world. Highly recommended.

'They felt at once profoundly numb and profoundly ecstatic to be young and inflicting optional damage on each other; the heat was its own justification, but so was the cold- there was a second-order thrill in knowing you could kick someone in the chest without emotion.'

With two parents who are highly successful psychologists working for “The Foundation”, surely one would imagine their son Adam would have a solid structure to build his life upon. It’s not so, the parents marriage isn’t so perfect neither is he the well rounded, popular student the surface would have people believe. Like other foundation kids, he is on his way up, a debater and orator sure to win the state championship, popular with the other foundation kids despite being a poet (whom everyone knows makes you a total wimp, right), growing up in middle class Kansas, a seemingly charmed existence but his parents strategies are enough to drive him into a rage. He’s got verbal battles to channel bullying, a safe outlet. Thank god for his ‘language’, and he can always do ‘talk therapy’ or consult with someone they really admire, anything to dull that ‘intensity’ of his. A concussion leads to migraines, and of course there is terror in the debilitating neurological effects for people of any age. Are these migraines just the effects and pressures of ‘passing himself off as a real man?’ Lucky for Adam he has The Foundation and Erwood, “a pioneer in biofeedback” to pull him through.

There are pages where we get inside of Darren’s mind, a student with mental problems who is pulled into Adam’s circle,“Hadn’t they always been told to include him?” and involved in an incident that leads to a violent episode. In fact, this was what I loved most about the novel… that even parents with all their brilliant research and Adam’s father with his keen insight into troubled boys can still fail just like the rest of us. “Of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state, you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy…” you want to talk about intensity and aggression how about what it means for boys to embrace violent masculinity even in a world that is ‘inclusive’, with a top-notch support system. Kids will be cruel, even when they know better, even when they are trying to be better. There is a mockery of the world as modeled by their parents, and no one exposes it in the way Lerner does in this novel. Even the adults, like Adam’s father understands that you can’t transcend feelings, even if you do understand them.

Going back in time and reading about Adam’s parents family dynamics leads us to some understanding on why they are concerned about the human psyche, what they themselves have embraced or discarded from their own childhoods, all the old wounds. But a parent can’t apply their own lessons perfectly to their own children, we live in different times, different worlds. You still have to fight societal norms, the culture of youth, the expectations of peers and the world always breathing down your neck. Jane’s interactions with The Men, the harassment she tolerates because other women suffer so much worse. How it touches Adam when he is a young boy. Just who are the men? You know them, the woman haters, the ones who would have her raped and ‘taught a lesson’ if wishes could make it happen.

Having a successfully famous feminist mother, and wondering during an interaction with another mother and son should he feel proud or emasculated by mom’s success is a fascinating thought to explore. It seems her very existence can generate situations that demand Adam act out, with ape mentality. There is a section of the novel where his mother Jane is receiving an award after an encounter Adam has with a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. His behavior the opposite effect of what his feminist mother teaches others. The mockery from the protester when Adam does show his own hatred. When does masculinity cross the line, when is it more about appearances? What causes so much anger inside of Adam, whose been raised to redirect any form of aggression in a healthy way? The world still demands a man ‘prove’ his strength, the world still sizes him up. How do we fight back without losing our own dignity? This isn’t the last he will see of the protesters.

There seem to be pivotal moments in Adam’s life, the concussion and the incident that he drags with him into adulthood. Adam blames himself for Darren still too. The collapse of a serious relationship, the collapse of his own parents calm little marriage. Has he really ‘graduated from childhood’? What does that even mean? Has he learned to be a man yet, the sort of man mom wouldn’t be ashamed of, the sort of man that channels his own father’s calmness? But there are so many tests for a man beginning in childhood to adolescence, and then fatherhood?

The story shifts perspectives, we see the infidelities through his father Jonathan (how we cross the lines of intimacy in marriage), the toxic violence of our current times, the issue of masculinity, why Jane holds herself back, how our past can both guide and haunt us and the impossible task of trying to understand what it means to even be a man anymore in the world. How we distort the truth, how we make sense of the chaos outside and inside of us. Time skips, and folds in on us through the telling, it works in this novel. How do you raise a solid human being when our culture is crumbling, especially as Adam is coming of age in the 90s, where being a man seems to be modeled on demeaning others, on knowing if you can ‘take someone down’? Having a feminist mother, parents who understand the human psyche doesn’t mean the rot of the world won’t stick to you. This is an intelligent novel but it felt scattered sometimes. There is a lot going on, and you have to keep up.

Publication Date: October 1, 2019

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I had not read any of Ben Lerner’s previous works, but I had grown up in Kansas City and had spent much time at my grandparents’ farm near Topeka. I had also read quite a few positive early reviews of this novel, which seems to be getting a lot of great buzz. So, I really, really wanted to like this book, and I began reading with high hopes. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed.

I found this to be an unexciting narrative about Adam, a very talented member of his high school debate team; his father, a psychologist; and his mother, a famous feminist author. Also woven in and around these main characters is insight into a young man named Darren, a loner who committed an act of violence. The story is told from the main characters’ alternating points of view and from different time periods, thus making the plot (what there is of it) quite confusing and disjointed. This was rather a laborious read for me, and I found it very hard to get through some pretty dense writing. I also could not really connect with any of the characters, although recognizing various geographic references sprinkled throughout the story brought back many pleasant memories for me.

While I found this a difficult read and the writing generally heavy and opaque, I nonetheless admired many of the passages and descriptions this novel contains. Lerner’s being a poet often shines though into his writing style, and some of his sentences I read and re-read because they were so beautifully constructed. All in all, though, this book just did not work for me.

Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, an exploration of the origins of (some) toxic masculinity, is excellent. Yes, there are a lot of narrators and a lot of timelines that sometimes jump around in a way that you can’t tell who is experiencing the action, but if you submit to it and stick with it it is a very rewarding reading experience. Lerner is extremely talented and his novel is uniquely, spectacularly well-written and packed with stunning prose. If you enjoy a novel that requires you to work a bit, you’ll find it satisfying.

Ben Lerner's Topeka School is a significant expansion in form and theme after the more contained Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. I think there are comparisons to be made to Infinite Jest as both of these books are dealing with academic families, fictional institutions, and have non-conventional narratives. The Topeka School is missing a lot of the artifice of Infinite Jest, likely because Lerner writes fiction with more of the poet's economy of language than Wallace's maximalism. I found the very beginning and very end of Topeka School to be the most dialed-in and thus the most precisely rendered. Great depictions of both teenage life and fatherhood. I look forward to a re-read to make a few more connections between the threads.

When Jane and Jonathan each go to work at the Topeka School, a innovative psychiatric clinic, they never mean to make it permanent, but after finding each other and a nice Victorian they could never have afforded to buy in New York, they have a son, Adam, and settle in. The book moves back and forth between these three characters, and a fourth; a patient at the clinic. The novel is about the three members of the Gordon family, but it's also about the overly close relationships that formed between the therapists working at the clinic, a film project run by Jonathan, the city of Topeka, Kansas in the nineties, Jane's battle with The Men, and a great deal about high school debate tournaments.

Ben Lerner has an easy writing style and and this novel went down easy, despite the broad range of ideas and numerous plot threads. And disjointed as it all felt after a while, he does pull all the seemingly disparate elements mostly together at the end. Given the quantity of different topics introduced, there were some I was less interested in (debate team) than others (all of Jane's chapters), but I was never tempted to skip any of it.

Frequently brilliant, The Topeka School is at once a synthesis of Lerner's previous two novels and an expansion of his powers beyond the somewhat cloistered focalization of those excellent works. Faulkner is the surprising structural influence here, as the narrative voice shifts between the Lerner figure, his parents, and a disabled teenager peripherally (yet inextricably) related to the central family. The Adam Gordon sections are as good as any autofiction he's written; the Darren chapters are impressive riffs on Faulkner's Benjy section; and the Jane chapters are impressive evidence of Lerner's ability to write outside his own voice. I found the Jonathan chapters to be the weakest and least essential. Some might prefer the novel's exploration of white masculinity to be a bit more streamlined, but Lerner is a natural collagist, and one of his greatest talents is the ability to constellate a number of ostensibly unrelated ideas in clever, emotionally impactful ways. Could easily consider this a masterpiece on re-read.

This book was nothing short of spectacular. It all revolved around people that were involved, or related someway to a psychological clinic based in Topeka. It was told from varying points of views were you connect with other characters and what events were like for them. The book begins and is interspersed with a boy that is affected by the actions of the main characters. It is kind of a coming of age around damaged parents who are trying to understand themselves in the process. I have added this author's other books to my wish list and will be recommending this book avidly to others.

Ben Lerner's The Topeka School is an evocative book with themes that are resonant for current times (e.g., the rise of populism, toxic masculinity). This book will likely be a challenging read for some. Elements of the prose are dense at times. However, the overall structure and arc of the book is one of the most interesting I've read in recent years. For those familiar with Lerner's life, they'll be able to make connections to some of the semi-autobiographical elements of the novel, which adds a layer of richness to the story.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts are my own.

First off – full disclosure: I am a Ben Lerner completist. I think he is brilliant and wonderful. I feel he captures the zeitgeist as well or better than any contemporary poet/novelist.
And “The Topeka School“ is therefore an extra special treat because it is clearly (semi-?) autobiographical. The setting is perfectly evoked – a major Behavioral Health institute that attracts all sorts of professionals and misfits to a prototypical small midwestern town. As Stefan (Bill Hader) would say on SNL, “it has everything” from sex, drugs, debate, proto-gangs, clueless parents, hip-hop emulating white kids, survivors of 20th century European carnage.
Lerner is a writer’s writer (and mentor which I so admire). Reading “The Topeka School” is like bathing in a sea of perfectly constructed sentences. While you might not always be exactly sure of who is saying what to whom, you can be sure that they are saying/thinking it in a more profound way than you ever expected. Sentences and passages need to be carefully read and re-read.
“The Topeka School” is an important addition to Lerner’s ever impressive oeuvre. Let me know when the next piece is reading. I will devour it whole and enjoy every minute.
Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGally for the eArc.

Ideal third installment of a trilogy with Leaving the Atocha Station and 10: 04 . In both cases there’s at stake a curious and intelligent hybrid between facts and fictions, autobiographical elements and in the case of 10:04 also of metanarrative elements. On The Topeka School we find the same Adam Gordon, but here he is a teenager in the 90s in Topeka, Kansas, where he is a high school student, Ivy League-bound (Columbia, like Ben Lerner), is part of the debating team (like Ben Lerner), is an aspiring poet (like Ben Lerner), and the son of a psychoanalyst active in feminism (like Ben Lerner's mother). All these autobiographical elements merge into an elegant structure, a perfectly synchronized mechanism built around the theme of Toxic Masculinity, until its climax, in the last part of the book, when we meet an adult Adam Gordon involved in some way with the patriarchal and racist structures that have triggered the ‘male resentment’ on which Trump has relied much of his politics, maybe the real subject of the novel.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Beyond amazing I enjoyed this book so very much. The characters and storyline were fantastic. The ending I did not see coming Could not put down nor did I want to.

This book was so hard to read. The writing was all over the place. I wanted to like this so much. At times the characters seemed interchanged. Disappointed in this one.

Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.

When so many plot points converge with the reality of the author's life, it is hard to differentiate where fiction and confession converge and separate. Like protagonist Adam, Ben Lerner grows up in Topeka Kansas with his parents who are both psychologists (his mother a published author with a fine reputation in women's issues), graduates in 1997, currently lives in Brooklyn, and is a professor of literature as well as a poet. But there is a cracking good story here, told from the viewpoints of Adam and his parents, spanning several time periods, culminating with a heartbreaking event, and ending in the current day, in which Lerner makes his feelings about the current administration and its immigration policies abundantly clear. Kudos.

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls, and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

I truly want to love or like the book. It was too hard to connect to anyone. I just felt it was a page filler at times.

There are a lot of interesting themes in The Topeka School. It spends a lot of time signposting the rise of populism in the United States.
There isn't, however, much of a plot. You don't get to feel much empathy for any character, and that's a problem for this reader. Two stars.

This book is like a skeleton clock: There are a lot of different elements, some of them only added or painted for show, coming together to form one mechanical piece – and while the first look suggests a complicated interplay of intricate parts, it’s ultimately just wheels and springs doing their thing, and the oscillation of the balance wheel remains minimal. Ben Lerner bombards his readers with topics and jumping timelines, but ultimately, the density of the writing does not cover up the fact that this story is lacking depth and elegance.

The main storyline focuses on Adam who is a debate champion at Topeka High School in the 90’s – just like the author once was. Adam’s parents work as psychologists, his mother is a renowned feminist and author – again, dito for Lerner, and that’s not all: The story is written down in 2019 by the now grown-up Adam, just like Lerner wrote this book. When it comes to mirror images and contrasts, it will be hard to outdo this book, because that’s basically what the whole construction relies upon.

From this main narrative thread, Lerner ventures into the lives of Adam’s parents, his grandparents (to a lesser degree) and the married Adam, constantly changing perspectives and giving the whole text the appearance of being a montage of interviews. This impression is partly disturbed by the insertion of the life story of Darren, a kid with a developmental disorder who went to school with Adam. Treated cruelly by his peers, Darren’s rage drives him to commit a heinous act for which Adam feels partly responsible.

Which leads us to the first major topic of the book: Toxic masculinity. Adam is struggling with migraines: “The pressures of passing himself off as a real man, of staying true to type – the constant weight lifting, the verbal combat – would eventually reduce him to a child again, calling out for his mother from his bed.” In his professional life, Adam’s dad is an expert for troubled boys, while he himself has issues with marital faithfulness; at the same time, his successful mother, “the Brain”, is confronted with sexist stereotypes, constantly stated by “the Men”. And then there’s Klaus, a holocaust survivor who, also a psychologist, is suffering from severe trauma (and might be gay). And then there’s Fred Phelps of the infamous Westboro Church, located in Topeka. And then there’s Adam’s friend Jason, and a father who abuses his daughter, and Donald Trump. This is a lot, and this is just one of the topics.

Lerner also connects questions of politics, technology, media and language (“if he had the language he wouldn’t express himself with symptoms”) throughout the narrated time. Often, he does this by employing the aforementioned mirror images: For instance, there is a rosewood table and a rose painting, a kid with a head injury and a mother looking “concussed”, and there are even sequences repeated verbatim “mother, mom, mommy”, “the curve where her shoulder met her breast”, etc. Plus there are lots and lots of tornadoes and thunderstorms, fittingly sweeping up everything in a destructive whirl; Darren even thinks he managed to create a tornado with supernatural powers, thus wreaking havoc.

And if you now think “enough already”, I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is yet another layer to this: Various strands in the book are playing with Hermann Hesse’s short story “Ein Mensch mit Namen Ziegler”. Ziegler is an average guy with a firm believe in the power of science and money, until he takes a mysterious pill; fast forward: He ends up in an institution (read the story and watch out for the pills / the institution that feature in Lerner’s text!).

So much for the German short story, and I am aware that lately, it has been chic to incorporate German words into books, but kids “who had no volk beyond their common privilege” simply makes no sense. I see what you mean, Ben Lerner, but really: This is gibberish. Also, I had to look up “Kohlwurst”, because I’ve never heard of it (it’s apparently a real, but rather obscure thing), and God only knows why Lerner writes “Schirmmütze” instead of “cap”.

So in a way, this whole novel reads like a debate (unsurprisingly, there are many debates depicted in the text) or one of the frequently mentioned Thematic Apperception Tests: “America was one vast institution; it had no outside.” This is a message that comes across, and there are some smart ideas and strong passages in this text, especially when Lerner talks about the relationships between the characters, but all in all, it’s overwritten. Less could have been more.