The Topeka School
by Ben Lerner
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Pub Date Nov 07 2019 | Archive Date Dec 07 2019
Granta Publications | Granta Books
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Description
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. A renowned debater and orator, an aspiring poet, and - although it requires a lot of posturing and weight lifting - one of the cool kids, he's also one of the seniors who brings the loner Darren Eberheart into the social scene, with disastrous effects. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is a riveting story about the challenges of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a startling prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the tyranny of trolls and the new right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
Advance Praise
‘The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It’s a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it’s written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired’
Maggie Nelson
'In Ben Lerner’s riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very centre of our country’s most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family’s interconnected strengths and silences. What’s revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner’s most essential and provocative creation yet'
Claudia Rankine
‘Ben Lerner has redefined what it means for a writer to inhabit an American present by showing how a family reckons with its past. Here the personal and political are masterfully interwoven. The Topeka School is brave, furious, and finally a work of love’ Ocean Vuong
‘The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight and deep psychological sensitivity. At every turn, its beautifully realised characters are shaped, even in the privacy of their inner lives, by the pressures of history and culture – this is a book not only about how things really feel, but what things really mean. To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here’
Sally Rooney
‘Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new... He is one of my favourite living writers’ Rachel Kushner
‘Ben Lerner is a masterful writer who destabilizes the very notion of what a novel can achieve by making it new at every turn. The Topeka School is not only a fiction for our times, but for the ages: insightful, humane, politically astute, and true’
Hilton Als
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781783785360 |
| PRICE | £16.99 (GBP) |
Featured Reviews
Neil G, Reviewer
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.
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