A pretty middle-of-the-road book. It was fine but nothing about it gripped me, it was cliched, over-written and as such rarely engaging.

This wasmt an enjoyable read and I wouldnt recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

Ben Lerner is showing the reader just how clever he is but it doesn't really work in this sprawling confusing novel.
Whilst there are some enjoyable moments in this, they are greatly outweighed by the sheer confusing tangle people and ideas all strung together with sometimes unreadable language that makes the book a real slog at times. The constant flipping between characters and timeframes is confusing, There were multiple moments where I found myself going back pages to try to figure out who, what or where we were, and that can wear a reader down, even if there are some smart portions of the book.

I abandoned this very early on - I just couldn't get into it at all. It was far too clever for its own good.
I rarely bail on books but I did in this instance.

Sorry I just couldn't get into it. I'm sure it's great - just not my thing. I couldn't identify with the characters or find logic to their actions.

I loved Ben Lerner's previous book and recommended it to everyone I met; I'll be doing the same with this one, I'm sure.

This has been on my list for a while. I’d read a lot about Lerner’s novel, how its place in literature marks a change and, being less conventional, the way future prose will evolve, perhaps. Having not read the other two books in the discrete trilogy, this has been my first experience of Lerner’s writing.

Admittedly, The Topeka School is well-written. It focuses on the life of Adam, a public speaking champion, but it’s about so much more: in many ways, it is a social commentary of modern American life, and the role that men play in the world today.

In all honesty, I didn’t really enjoy this book. The switching of perspectives and viewpoints, although technical, made the reading experience disjointed. I found myself losing the narrative thread which affected my overall reaction to this novel.

Adam lives in Topeka, Kansas. He is a successful high school debater and lives with his parents in an affluent neighbourhood. Topeka is a city where differences aren't really tolerated and his parents are psychologists working with the different. When Adam brings an outsider into his social group changes happen and not necessarily for the better.
I loved the start of this book and was completely gripped but that didn't last. The narrative jumps between characters and time frames and somewhere around the middle I started to get lost and my the end it was just determination that got me through. I know this is supposed to be superior literary writing but to me it was just trying to hard.

I am in charge of our Senior School library and am looking for a diverse array of new books to furnish their shelves with and inspire our young people to read a wider and more diverse range of books as they move through the senior school. It is hard sometimes to find books that will grab the attention of young people as their time is short and we are competing against technology and online entertainments.
This was a thought-provoking and well-written read that will appeal to our readers across the board. It had a really strong voice and a compelling narrative that I think would capture their attention and draw them in. It kept me engrossed and I think that it's so important that the books that we purchase for both our young people and our staff are appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible - as well as providing them with something a little 'different' that they might not have come across in school libraries before.
This was a really enjoyable read and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for school so that our young people can enjoy it for themselves. A satisfying and well-crafted read that I keep thinking about long after closing its final page - and that definitely makes it a must-buy for me!

Clever, pyrotechnical writing. Which never loses touch with character or behaviour. Ben Lerner building on reputation as first class wordsmith and forensic eye on the ordinary.

5 stars

The central character in this book is Adam but the narrative is shared between him and his two parents, Jonathan and Jane. The background to the novel is the conservative US city of Topeka where a group of, I was going to say misfit, psychologists have set up a comparatively radical school of psychoanalysis. Everyone seems to be analysing everyone else and nothing can happen without being explored, unwrapped and poked!

No wonder that Adam is a little strange. I found him decidedly disturbed but I think he's meant to be something of a child prodigy with his capacity for taking part in pointless, rhetorical and competitive debates throughout his school career. Later on, he marries and has children but continues to overanalyse himself and others.

There are other characters on the Topeka scene. There's Darren who has learning difficulties as a counterpoint to Adam, an old psychologist called Klaus, and Jonathan and Jane's best friends, Eric and Sima. It's quite a society and the interrelationships are complicated.

The book covers a long period but is largely focused on the 1990s tracking Adam's early schooling to his adulthood during, arguably, a key phase in American history and the story links into contemporary events to help frame the narrative.

Having said all that, there is something odd about it. I didn't exactly warm to Adam and less so to his dysfunctional parents for whom a form of passive aggression linked to psychobabble replaces conversation. The young people in Topeka are also violent and unpleasant ranging from the ones who delight in destroying others in debates to the ones that taunt poor Darren. Is the Topeka school a good thing? I don't know.

So, what's it about? Well, I think it must be something to do with the changed state of America, more angry people, a failure in care and the circumstances which allowed Donald Trump to emerge as president. It's also something to do with how people communicate or don't talk and how everything is a subject for the psychologist and the psychiatrist. There are clues about this but somehow it didn't get me on board with its unlikable characters and fake friends and colleagues.

Autofiction appears to be very modish. Though the term was only coined in 1977 it’s probably been around for ages. I’m not quite sure why I feel resistance to it as a form, or genre. Aren’t all fictitious works, even the most fantastical, a form of autofiction, in that they must be informed, even tangentially, by the writer’s own experience of the word? It seems I’ve read a lot about it, without actually reading it. The descriptions and reviews of much of its celebrated manifestations leave me cold. (Yes, Klaus Ove Knausgard, I’m looking at you, and I’m not too bothered as clearly you’re doing perfectly well with or without my approbation).
In The Topeka School, Adam, as I understand it, is a stand-in for Ben Lerner. I wasn’t sure who Darren, the barely-tolerated outsider who commits an atrocity against a woman with a cue ball, was meant to be. The nerdish, nice and generally politically correct Adam’s shadow side?
This novel has been ecstatically reviewed in places, so I am probably missing something. It’s beautifully written for the most part but, for me, it staggered under the weight of its own significance.
As an aside, the descriptions of top-level high school debating (also autobiographical, I am led to understand) were horribly fascinating. Some contestants use a technique called the spread, in which arguments are shot out at such a machine gun level that their opponents cannot hope to respond to all or indeed most of them. Are school debating contests a thing in the UK? I have no idea. I rather hope not. Like Black Friday and the school prom, America is welcome to keep them to itself.

A writer on the rise, and deservedly so.

This is a lush and beautifully written novel that covers the problems and issues of growing up, manhood and parenthood.

It is sometimes hard to follow and requires massive concentration but it was a joy to read owing to its perception and sheer beauty of the writing.

Intelligent, multilayered and difficult to stop thinking about. Definitely Lerner's most accomplished and mature novel yet. I will be recommending this a lot this Christmas as I'm sure anyone who enjoys literary fiction will love it.

I really enjoyed this intelligent, deceptively slender, dense novel about language and its failures.

Exceptionally well-written and complex narrative delivered by generations of intertwined voices. It’s bad drop, the Topeka School, is a leading centre of psychotherapeutic enquiry in Kansas. It’s both Intellectually and narratively satisfying. Definitely one for anyone interested in psychodynamics.

This is a deeply interesting tale of language and words, family and masculinity. Crossing over generations and meeting the reader with an immediate drop into the world of the novel, The Topeka School packs a big punch in under 300 pages. As an autofiction novels, Lerner experiments to push his own experiences into a consideration of toxic masculinity in the late 1990s Topeka. His protagonist walks a liminal space between two worlds- the measured, Freudian life of his parents as therapists and the rage, violence and anger of his peers. The novel is clear in its view that men use language to ascend and control, while the women of this world are more rounded and ultimately successful communicators. The men in this world speak to erase the person they're speaking to, leaving Lerner with a novel that expresses, in few pages but many words, how we got to the point of Men's Rights Activists and a Trump White House.

As a longstanding fan of Lerner, I had high hopes for this book and it didn't disappoint. He has an incredible talent for crafting complex narratives which collapse in on themselves, producing novels which are not only narratively compelling, but a joy to read. This novel focuses on adolescent boys in Topeka, Kansas, where Lerner himself grew up; but although the book's primary focus is masculinity and its discontents, it also explores a great deal in the realms of (for example) psychiatry, love, and linguistics. For those who are already fans of Lerner's work, I would wholeheartedly recommend; if you're new to him, then I would still recommend The Topeka School, with the advice that the best way to read a Lerner novel is to just lose yourself in it, and once you're done, to read it again.

My review here of Ben Lerner's The Topeka School here
https://wordpress.com/post/volatilerune.blog/828

Whilst there are some good moments in this, they are vastly outweighed by the sheer confusing tangle of webs and people and ideas all strung together with high brow language that makes the book a real drudge to try to plough through. The constant flipping of characters and between the past and the present is confusing, particularly when the language makes it so difficult to easily grasp what is going on. There were multiple moments where I found myself going back pages to try to figure out who, what or where we were, which simply shouldn't happen if a book is well written.

In honesty, this comes across as the author trying so hard to be clever, to be literary that he ends up losing sight of the things that actually make a good novel like a strong narrative voice, characters you can empathise with and writing you are drawn in by. The narrative voice here is all over the place as Lerner tries to do so many things with so many characters that it is just a mess of half formed ideas. You have Adam's story as he grows up, a champion debater trying to fit in as one of the lads. Then you have his parents stories - a psychologist and a famous feminist author - and, to a lesser degree, his grandparents. You have a whole load of psychology and psychoanalysis scattered through the book, along with a retelling and constant references Hesse's short story, A Man By the Name of Ziegler, which is used constantly to highlight characters actions throughout the book.

On top of this you have a variety of themes scattered through the novel; politics and Trump and protesters, the psychology of debating and it's inclusion in the real world, toxic masculinity, the #metoo movement, the abuse of strong female figures and use of psychology to shut them up. Homosexuality gets a look in, as does adultery and the aspects of sexuality in growing up and in a completely different line, you get the story of Darren, a youngster with a significant development disorder, how he is treated by his peers and how it results in violence. On top of this, the time lines are all over the place, often shifting without any warning and you have to figure out what the hell is going on... which due to the writing style can sometimes take pages at a time. There is far too much going on here and due to the mass of ideas vomited across the pages, most aspects feel rushed and unfinished. Of the aspects that do get delved into deeply, you end up with a huge amount of psycho-babble and naval gazing, which feels self-indulgent rather than actually bringing anything useful to the plot.

Bringing the focus back to the writing style and use of language, some aspects are highly poetic, but as a whole the entire novel is hugely over-written. There is a lot of repetition, obviously deliberate, as Lerner tries to bring aspects to the fore or link them to something that has previously occurred; the use of Ziegler is a key example of this. More than that though, the writing is so dense that it is a struggle to get through. There's huge swathes of description, psychology and introspection, which would slow the pace down anyway, and because the writing is so heavy and dense it amplifies this effect ten fold. When put together with the style involving so much flipping between present and past, it means the novel never seems to be going anywhere and the characters are floating in a sea of excessive vocabulary and complex sentences.

All in all, this really wasn't for me. I got to the end because having been given an ARC copy, it only seemed fair. If I'd have bought it, I very much doubt I'd have got past about 20%. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.