The Topeka School

(58) Really interesting, incredibly well-written novel about a community of psychotherapists in the 1990's in Topeka, Kansas. Really about one family, in particular the son of two therapists, Adam Gordon. We get to know Adam through his parents reflections when he is a child as well as his own. The book is loosely framed as something that Adam himself is writing as an adult. Interspersed are chapters written in italics from a character named Darren - an intellectually disabled boy that unwittingly becomes part of a tragic drama that seems to be a central plot element holding the narrative together. Many of the reviewers blurbs on the pages that lead into the book compare the author to Faulkner, and the comparison is apt. Introspection, show more meandering construction, evocative if not entirely understandable.

There were points in this novel where I absolutely was floored by the turns of phrase and taught edgy intelligent observations. To paraphrase my favorite insight when discussing the downsides of "therapy" - 'giving language to feelings does not mean you will transcend them; instead the opposite is true - you just feed them.' Spot on and oh so snarky - I need to find some way to sneak it into a conversation with some of my bleeding-heart colleagues.

I think though either I am not astute enough to grasp the point of the narrative arc or there is really not great plot resolution in this novel which accounts for the 1 star off. Unfortunately there seems to be no beginning, no middle, no end. I am sure this is purposeful and while it does not detract from the stunning prose - it leaves one with an unsettling feeling of pointlessness at the conclusion. The novel does not feel finished, as fewer and fewer pages were left to be turned - I started to feel disappointed.

Really beautiful, incredible intelligent writing. The high school debate championship underscored my lasting impression of this novel -- precise and accurate language, rhetoric, knowledge and speech as a form of ungovernable power. show less

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 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 show more 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

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 show more 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. show less

By now we know that a novel by Ben Lerner will never be simple or go about telling its story in an obvious way. His prose is deeply entrenched in his characters’ states of mind. His observations about human behaviour and motivation are subtle, intricate and often startling. He writes with a degree of personal honesty and moral clarity that is refreshing and beguiling, even when he describes unpleasant, difficult, humiliating or traumatic events. He can be funny and profoundly intellectual at the same time. His approach is never straightforward. The building blocks of his fiction rarely line up in expected ways. His novels demand much of the reader, but the rewards are substantial. Such is The Topeka School, which marks the return of show more Adam Gordon, widely recognized by critics as Lerner’s fictional alter-ego, whom we first met in Leaving the Atocha Station. The novel is set in Topeka, Kansas during a fluid time period that encompasses Adam’s early formative years and extends briefly into his young adulthood. A high-school senior (class of 1997), Adam is also a champion debater who is prepping for a national competition that he is expected to win, and he feels the weight of those expectations. Adam’s mother, Jane, is a bestselling feminist author whose liberal views, particularly her opinion that toxic masculinity is to blame for much of what is wrong with American society, have been met with outrage in less progressive circles. Jonathan, Adam’s father, is a psychologist whose special talent is getting troubled young men to recognize and admit to their fears. The Gordon family is well off, privileged, and aware of their privilege. But Jane and Jonathan’s marriage is strained, and Adam endures migraines resulting from a concussion suffered when he was much younger. The novel is narrated by Adam, Jane and Jonathan in discrete sections in which each describes private, family and professional dynamics from an intimate personal perspective. Lerner’s narrative does not play by conventional rules. There are numerous abrupt shifts in time, space and perspective. The text is peppered with meta-fictional authorial interjections—the novel even refers to itself as a novel—and lengthy expository passages on topics like debate strategy and psychological theory. A recurring and crucial presence in the story is Darren Eberheart—a contemporary of Adam and a patient of Jonathan: an emotionally troubled and socially awkward young man who is bullied and mocked by his peers: a butt of jokes treated with cruel disdain by the teenagers whose fellowship and esteem he craves but will never obtain. The story of Adam’s youth pivots on an act of violence perpetrated by Darren on the eve of high school graduation, when, at a party, Darren is driven to extreme behaviour by frustration and rage. The Topeka School is a complex, bracingly alive, highly self-conscious, sometimes bewildering, occasionally exasperating novel that makes no apologies for its eccentricities. It is wise and elegant, difficult, sometimes preachy, and thoroughly engrossing. It is also smart and observant: a novel that has much to say about the turbulent era in which it was written. show less

This is one of the most complex and layered novels I've read in a while. Character-driven and told from multiple points of view, its center set is Topeka, Kansas, original home of the Menninger Clinic, the Fred Phelpses, and of course Brown v. Board of Education. The latter plays no role in this story but its presence is felt as Lerner explores layers of identity, especially as they play out in a teenage boy and his parents. There are ironic riffs that repeat throughout the narrative, often parenthetically and almost always humorously, as Jonathan, Jane, and Adam tell us about Adam's serious concussion at age 8, his developing sense of justice in relation to developmentally disabled classmate Darren, and the path his life takes as a show more competitive debater in high school. Darren has a voice, too, and his is fascinating. Jonathan's was, for me, the least compelling - and least sympathetic - voice. Jane and Adam are central and both are elegantly developed.

I can't do this novel justice. There were moments of irritation with the author's overkill of a thematic element but many more moments of appreciation for his subtlety, for his creative drawing of connections between cultural elements. His grasp of psychological theory is evident but not overwrought (close, that one). And his timing is exquisite. A very satisfying read. show less

The Topeka School is a beautifully written, original and off beat novel. It focuses on the ways that language is used and abused to wield power in personal, analytic and or/ political contexts. The story is told from the perspectives of Adam Gordon and each of his parents who are psychoanalysts at a famous institute in Topeka, Kansas. The alternating narratives provide insight into finely developed and nuanced characters, inter-generational family dynamics and class dynamics in the American mid-west during the 1990's.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book was the way it demonstrated the shifts in political rhetoric through Adam's stint as a high school debater, training to compete at the national level. Lerner brings show more us to the present and subtly shows how these shifting patterns led to the debasement of political rhetoric in the era of Trump.

I listened to this book on audio, which was a mistake. It is a book that needs to be read slowly and carefully. I plan to reread it as text. show less

The Topeka School is a book about form, not content, and, as you might expect, it's often frustratingly insubstantial. It seems that Lerner is going for a number of things here. First, it's autofiction that works through the sedimented strata of a complicated family history from a few richly-realized perspectives. Second, it's a fairly conventional coming of age story. Third, it's a novel about the particularities and dramas of psychoanalysis and formal debate. Fourth, it's a political novel, which attempts to tie all of these threads together into some sort of explanation of modern American conservatism.

Unifying these aims is a preoccupation with language. As Lerner's narrator describes the novel (is it meant to be Lerner himself?), show more it is a 'genealogy of his speech, its theaters and extremes.' Speech is unreliable for Lerner's characters, and often threatens to turn against them, to become autonomous. Adam, Lerner's stand-in, finds himself rehearsing and learning to speak in the voice of his amoral debate coach, panicking when he realizes he cannot recall the voices of those closest to him. Jonathan, Adam's father, realizes that the clinical language of psychoanalysis, far from dulling self-destructive impulses, can tacitly legitimize them.

The writing of the novel reflects this preoccupation. The book is told in discrete chapters, each in the voice of a single character, and often as a stream of consciousness retelling. This has a kaleidoscopic effect. We see many events through the eyes of multiple characters, each picking up on different details and drawing different conclusions, giving the events a different place in their minds.

The result of the book's division into so many little pieces, and its stream of consciousness approach, is a text full of discontinuities. In their re-tellings of their memories, characters jump quickly between memories that are years apart, spending long passages describing the intricacies of particular relational dynamics, while breezily passing over formative parts of their lives. It is not always easy, then, to see the connections Lerner intends to draw, to understand how events come to pass, or to appreciate their importance. Much of the early novel is built to lead up to a foreshadowed Terrible Event, but the novel seems almost embarrassed by the conceit once it finally gets there. We are given one or two disconnected pages, and then a brief epilogue of sorts.

Approaches like this serve some of Lerner's goals and undermine others. The portrait of the Gordon family is rich and multilayered, and I found myself invested in many of the relationships between characters. Lerner has a real talent for drawing out the meaning from little bumps in the texture of our lives. But for an ostensibly political novel, the politics seem curiously missing. We only learn that Adam's left of center from the feedback of his debate coach. We almost never see him debate, hear the dialogue in which his explains his beliefs, or see the movement or development of his ideas. We never get a sense, except from very far away, of the way Adam is being pulled in multiple directions. Maybe this indicates a pessimism on Lerner's part: if language has broken down to pure superficial persuasion, without substance, then how could we meaningfully think in order to change our beliefs?

Likewise with other aspects of Adam's development. We see Adam as a child; as a teen; as an adult. But there is curiously little in between. I had no sense, by the end of the novel, who Adam really was, or how he got there. All I had was a collection of little disconnected features that in no way cohered.

I suspect that many of my criticisms of the book are the results of intentional choices on Lerner's part. Maybe my frustration with the lack of character interiority is intended to demonstrate something about the kind of psychoanalytic introspection the book's form mimics. Maybe Lerner's trying to say that, once we start to look into ourselves, we do not find any deep and lasting structure, but rather a thousand tiny reflective scraps spread around, like a kaleidoscope. Maybe. Still, I can't get away from my dissatisfaction with the books central political theme. Drawing a broad analogy between the speech in our toxic media ecosystem and scummy debate tactics does not feel particularly inspired. The book's lack of focus even detracts from some of its strongest elements. For instance, the novel begins with a well-observed vignette between Adam and his girlfriend Amber, positioning her as a laconic, self-aware foil to Adam, and then proceeds to ignore her for the next 200 or so pages. This was my biggest frustration with the book. So many parts of it were good. But they did not jell together, and would disappear just as soon as they appeared. If you like a character, fine. That's all you're getting from them, though.

Looking back, I'm surprised at how critical this review has been. I found the book challenging, rewarding, and frustrating, but certainly worth reading. Lerner has a unique voice and he's doing ambitious things, which don't always succeed, but are enjoyable even when they fail.

This is my first Ben Lerner book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work. show less