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.

History, memory, language, culture, how did we get to where we are today? These are some of the themes Ben Lerner explores in The Topeka School, the first novel of his I have read. It is a clever book, demanding at times but after reading quite a few undemanding and somewhat disappointing novels recently, it was a bit like finding water in the desert.

Adam Gordon, a senior at The Topeka School in 1997 is an aspiring poet and a competitive debater and, to counterbalance the perceived softness and nerdiness of the first two, a weightlifter, free-style rapper and a member of the popular crowd in his school. His father Jonathan is a psychologist working with adolescent boys, like Adam’s unstable school friend Darren and his mother Jane, a famous feminist author with her own difficult childhood. The fragmented narrative shifts between these four characters and between past and present as it considers parenting and growing up in an increasingly fragmented country.

The writing is so sharp at times, that thinking about it, the best word I can come up with to describe it is merciless, especially when Adam, the author’s alter ego, talks about competitive debating. So foreign to my own background and fascinating. Reading about it in the week of British parliamentary debates spiralling out of control, you can’t help drawing parallels between certain kinds of education and certain types of politicians and politics it breeds.

Lerner’s writing is also often visual, cinematic. On occasion, he will liken a scene to a silent film and invite the reader to imagine it set to music. These scenes are mostly Jonathan’s narrative and recollections, he is also a filmmaker. As the book progresses, however, other characters’ narratives also occasionally assume this cinematic character and distinction between first and third person blurs. I thought this was slightly overworked, especially towards the end of the book when I found the individual voices also blurring.

Memorable side characters serve as bookends of sorts. Klaus, an older psychologist from Europe who once worked with Jung and is a mentor to Jonathan, first sums up adolescent boys Jonathan works with: “Peter Pan, a man-child, since America is adolescence without end”. The Peter Pan theme is repeated throughout: ”intelligent middle-class white kids from stable homes who were fine until they weren’t: the lost boys of privilege.” And Adam’s debating coach, past national champion, Peter Evanson embodies it: “a precocious young man destined for the corridors of power”, “master of what would come to be called “trolling””.

Overall, The Topeka School is a very good book, the writing is often brilliant and always intelligent but I also think it slightly suffers from too many ideas that are not always fully brought into and connected to the narrative. Still, it is one of the better books I’ve read this year.

My thanks to Netgalley and Granta Books for the opportunity to read The Topeka School.

Have you ever come across books that never seem to end and every time you pick one up, you struggle to read as many pages as the last time you picked it up. The Topeka School is one of those...

Structurally, The Topeka School should be right up my alley - shifting points of view following four characters, non-linear time sequence, fragments building into a whole. The trouble was, it was all too verbose. Two of the characters were psychologists (one practising and one a famous writer) and their sections had way too much psycho-babble. Adam, their son, was (bizarrely) a champion debater, a rapper, a sportsman and popular - although his mother, at least, seemed to think he was emotionally stunted. He had his moments - when he was actually doing something - but there was way too much navel-gazing and fretting about having a controversial mother. It was dull.

The main redeeming feature were the sections from Darren's perspective. Darren was a school contemporary of Adam and had some kind of intellectual disability. Adam and his mates oscillated between socialising with him out of sympathy and trying to manipulate him into being a figure of ridicule. It was ugly, but engrossing and it was obviously not going to end well (as the non-linear timeline made clear from the beginning).

I think the idea was that The Topeka School should speak about the current state of Middle America (Kansas previously being famous only for not being Oz). It might have done that with more accessible characters and by not trying quite so hard to sound intellectual. This just buried any messages so far deep that the only people who will find them are the ones who don't need to hear them.

This is a very different book to Ben Lerner's previous novels. It's quite a tough read but extremely rewarding. I loved it and I feel like it's one that I need to go immediately back to beginning and read all over again.

I finished 'The Topeka School' a while ago, but have been waiting for my reactions to sink in before writing a review, which suggests I'm not sure about it. At first, it seemed more conventionally realist (and less self-referential) in approach than Lerner's previous novels, but then the narrators shift and the narratives overlap and fragment as the novel attempts to use its account of 1990s USA to shed light on the challenges it faces today. There's some fine writing and perceptive accounts of the challenges of both getting through teenage and parenting a teenager, but I think it may have needed either to be more fragmented or more traditionally unified as a book to really hit home. There's lots of good set pieces - the gripping open scene by the lake, the intense descriptions of the debates in which Adam, the central figure, excels, the final section in contemporary USA - but they don't seem entirely to hold together.

Towards the end, it is said of the novel's central figure: "The desire to know more and the desire to know less fought each other to a standstill within Adam, making it hard to move". And although I enjoyed it, that's kind of how the novel left me.

This book is a perceptive story centred around adolescent males. It deals with those with special issues sensitively but at times at inordinate length. This is not a gripping story that builds to an unexpected climax. It must be recognised as an astute analysis of teenage issues but many readers will be dismayed by its length and detail.

Just not a book for me. I found the author a little too celebratory of his writing. It feels a bit smug. This may simply be a matter of translating it from the american, but I couldn't finish this. I am grateful to have had the chance to read (and sadly discard) this book.

I would say I found this novel more clever and ambitious than enjoyable. In tracing back our present to the past, Lerner takes on issues of toxic masculinity and the sort of crisis of white manhood that Trump exploits so well. It also deals with issues of democratic speech and huge shifts in media, while trying to tie it all in to a family's tribulations. Add in shifting focalisations and fragmented narratives, repeated events seen through different eyes, and some rather clumsy imagery of reflections and mirrors, and this started to feel in need of some serious untangling to me. I'm not sure there's anything fundamentally new being said here but the liberal consciousness should have spoken to me more than it did - the busy structure and form took away from the points being made in places.

The Topeka School is a novel about masculinity and the making of the modern age. It focuses on Adam Gordon, a Topeka High School senior trying to prove his title as a champion debater whilst maintaining his popular status. On the other side is Darren Eberheart, a loner who is suddenly welcomed into the popular kid scene. As the narrative moves into the past of Adam's parents and the future of Adam as an adult, it also returns to this point of two young men on the cusp of adulthood in the 90s, looking at the outsider figure and method of debating and expressing outrage in America.

This is a novel that tries to do a lot of things at once, looking at America over the past fifty years or so to follow the course of masculinity and free speech as well as the lives of Adam and his parents and those connected to them. At times this means that it can be confusing to follow until you settle into the different characters and time periods, but it is cleverly done to create tension around the events in the 90s and the act of violence at its heart. The novel is clearly very clever, with a lot of consideration of psychology, debate, and the state of America, but the elements didn't quite come together.

The Topeka School doesn't quite deliver on its promises, providing interesting characters and use of narrative, but not quite delving enough into what the issues it explores mean for people (both the young white men the novel focuses on and other people) both then and now.

The main protagonist of Lerner’s first book was a young poet named Adam Gordon. Here, in The Topeka School, the centre of the story is also Adam Gordon only this time we straddle the period of Leaving the Atocha Station with views from the late-twentieth century and from now (2019). The Topeka School is, partly, a family history examining the early years of the Gordon family - Jane, a psychologist and then famous feminist author, Jonathan, also a psychologist with a knack for treating wayward boys, and Adam their son, a brilliant debater. But it also includes now and shows us Adam as a grown up, family man.

As with Lerner’s first two novels, there is a large autobiographical, auto-fiction element to this third novel. Lerner himself grew up in Topeka, the child of psychologist parents, and with a keen interest in debating.

The story here unfolds in non-chronological, multi-narrator fashion as each of Jane, Jonathan and Adam take turns to give their perspective. Each of them looks back to formative events in their family history, centred around Adam, but also covering the time before Adam was born.

Between these cycles of narrative, we read of Darren, a mentally disturbed teenager who, as we learn on the very first page, has committed an act of violence that we will learn the relevance of as we progress through the book.

In essence, this is a family story as told by family members looking back. At the same time it is an exploration of some of the forces that have led us to Donald Trump being president of the United States. At times, the cleverness of the structure threatens to overwhelm the story. There is a lot about reflections/reflecting (I guess you would expect that in a novel about a family where both parents are psychologists), there are multiple references to confusion between first and third person, multiple references to speech disintegrating when under pressure, multiple phrases that recur and echo through the book. It is often funny, but it is sometimes funny only because the alternative is to cry. I’ll leave you to discover the Phelps for yourselves - they provide some laugh out loud moments but also represent so much that is wrong in society.

Only a very short time before I read this, I read Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport”. And in many ways, I think these two books make an interesting pairing. Both are concerned with the state of the nation (USA) and, even though they take very different approaches to telling their story, both provide an interesting structure that takes you into the minds and thoughts of their protagonists. Ducks, Newburyport literally inhabits the thoughts of one person (for over 1000 pages) in incomplete sentences that often last for over 100 pages, whereas The Topeka School is a bit more conventional in its grammar and takes us into the minds of three/four people in more of a narrative form than Ducks…’ stream-of-consciousness.

curtisbrown.co.uk says: "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 a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the new right, the ongoing crisis of identity among white men."

I think that’s a fair summary.