Ben Lerner (1) (1979–)

Adam Gordon is a high school senior on the debating team, soon to be national champion at extemporizing, but equally adept at policy debate wherein the favoured modernist technique is the spread. The spread is a presentation of so many “facts”, so much “evidence”, so many “arguments”, so incredibly quickly that those not versed in this technique might easily confuse what they are hearing for nonsense or the glossolalia of rapture. Yet the spread can render one’s opponent show more impotent, unable to even enumerate all of the rapidly heard arguments that have been presented let alone respond to them. And the spread is spreading. You can hear it in the surfeit of “information” channels submerging not just thoughtful debate but thought itself. You can see it in the massed rows of cereal boxes in a superstore rendering choice impossible. You can feel it in the fear of disconnection. But once you are spread, there’s almost nothing you can do about it.

There is something intensifying in a Ben Lerner novel. Images, motifs, phrases, sentences come round again, and again. Each time they take on a different aspect, they complicate themselves and those images or phrases around them. Soon the effect begins to intensify. Everything becomes both more meaningful and less certain. You begin to feel like a space within a highly orchestrated symphony. So much going on around you and you feel like if you could be completely still you might just hear it all at once. It’s a futile hope but inevitable. The effect is sublime. Or maybe you’re just suffering from the spread.

This is a stunning novel of art, politics, the poetry of language, and the increasingly unlikely prospect for actual communication. Each chapter, presented from one of the three main characters’ perspectives, becomes a kind of set piece as motifs and themes re-emerge and complicate. Past and present and future (from some points of view) are always already in play. It could be intimidating but Lerner makes it easeful. This is a novel you will read quickly but be exhausted by, your breath quite literally taken away.

Astonishingly good and thus highly recommended. show less

Ben Lerner's most recent novel, The Topeka School, is a well written portrait of a family: a bright, but quick tempered son, Adam, who in high school becomes a nationally recognized debater, a psychologist mother whose books bring her fame, and father, also a psychologist at the Foundation, who specializes in lost boys. All three share narrative chapters. Not exactly sequential, their narratives often span time or even retell stories from different perspectives. We are also given brief show more italic passages between chapters of Darren's story, a classmate of Adam's with limited faculties, who lashes out in a moment of frustration.
The novel is also about language. Adam has it and can use it in competition and also at keg parties where vocal insults are used like weapons. His metaphor of " the spread " - "the act of making arguments and jamming in facts at such an unintelligibly fast pace that an opponent can’t possibly respond to them all effectively" (The Atlantic) brings the reader to a sense of what is controlling the national dialogue.
Lerner writes well about the late 1990's, and describes life in the Midwest with knowing insights and clever observations. He peppers the story line with essays about art, relationships, masculinity and psychology. At times for me the story itself, a bildungsroman for the most part, gets too sidetracked by the reflections, but I definitely found the novel to be engrossing and worthwhile. Lerner manages to provide insights into our current state of affairs by exploring his own upbringing. Another example of auto fiction that works well, relying on the author to blend his recollections with intellectual reflection.

Lines:
what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?

The intimacy between us was quick and intense; there was something giddy about it; we were like kids at summer camp or freshmen at college who glom on to a new friend with an excitement tinged with desperation.

Reynolds peeling off his sweatshirt in the cold to reveal a six-pack, lats that made his torso appear hooded like a cobra.

I accepted the gum like a Communion wafer, some sign of absolution, new resolve. show less

A kafkaesque piece about the existential effects of screens and digital media on our lives. The unnamed narrator drops his phone in water on his way to interview his 90 year old mentor. Through this section there are constant reminders of how he has come to rely on his phone to locate himself in time and space and the disorientation he experiences without access to that.

Upon arrival at his mentor, Thomas', home there is more disorientation as the home appears as it did in the narrator's show more college days and yet is not quite the same. Thomas' memory seems to be fragmented, sprinkled with metaphors, and references to various art forms including Kafka's Hunger Artist. There is also conflation of memory between the narrator and Thomas' son, Max. The narrator has decided to work from memory in transcribing the interview though he leads Thomas to believe it is being recorded.

The second section deals with the unexpected reaction of the audience when he reveals during Thomas' eulogy that his last interview was not recorded but transcribed from the author's memory. Because of this he is accused of creating a fictional interview, as if the existence of a recording was needed to validate the interview as nonfiction. The memorial conference takes place in a hotel the straddles the border between Switzerland and France as a metaphor for the borders between fiction and reality. Switzerland is also referenced in all three sections of the book as it has become known as a suicide destination.

The final chapter is a dialogue between Max and the narrator. The content is primarily about Max's daughter who has an eating disorder (ARFID) and Max's last interactions with Thomas. The narrator also has a daughter with an anxiety disorder. The accelerated use of screens during the pandemic during enforced isolation plays a role here. And the use of ASMR videos seems to be the cure for Evie's eating disorder.

There's a lot to unpack in this narrative and the author draws no neat conclusions but instead leaves the reader to question the impact of digital devices on our memories, self awareness, memory, perception of reality, and our relationships with other humans. show less

This is not a book for someone who does not read poetry, believes s/he does not "get" poetry, or otherwise wants an introduction to help them fill the need to get a better great in Lit class. This is a thoughtful and passionate critical essay that ranges over centuries of conundrum: Why have so many for millennia spoken of their hate for poetry?

Along the way, Lerner provides brief and cogent explications of some poems. He clearly is careful and loving reader of poems. I Loved it when he said show more that Keats' poems failed to send him into trances or transports. And I agree that Dickinson's discords sing to me more than Keats's chords.

Ben Lerner loves poetry so much that he hates it. His explanation is a very Platonic one, that there is a sphere of ideal poems and that all earthbound ones are pale shadows. The gap between drives us to desire more from the individual poem we read than it can deliver and so the desire turns love of "Poetry" to hate of the particular poem.

I have defined poetry as "saying in words that which cannot be said in words---which means that every poem is a failure." That seems different from seeking a perfect poem and failing in that way. Seeking to say or sing the ineffable is by definition impossible. And I guess I have more of a Buddhist view of the music of perfect silence. The poem as koan is fine with me--a beautiful failure that means by failing to embody the meaning.

Enough of that---reading this little book was like listening to a fascinating friend tell a story by the fire. Definitely worth reading for haters and for lovers. show less