Fifty Books Project 2023

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The man-child, descendant of the jester and village idiot and John Clare, the poet roaming the countryside after enclosure.  The persistence of the mind of childhood – its plenitude and purposelessness – into the sexually mature body, which has succumbed to historical time, must log its hours.  The man-child represented a farcical form of freedom, magical thinking against the increasingly administered life of the young adult.  The teller of fantastic stories.  Almost every object in the man-child’s world reflected this suspension between realms:  his alcohol that was also soda, his weapons that were toys, how he might trade you two paper dollars for one of silver, valuing not credit so much as shine.  He had trouble managing his height or facial hair and when he injured actual children while demonstrating a wrestling move (clothesline, facehammer, DDT), it was a case of his “not knowing his own strength.”  He must, to fit the type, be not only male, but also white and able-bodied:  the perverted form of the empire’s privileged subject.  If he were a woman or a racialized or otherwise othered body, he would be in immediate mortal danger from sexual predators and police.  It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation:  the man-child was almost fit for school or work or service, could almost get his license, finally discard the dirt bike; too close to the norms to prove them by his difference, the real men – who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end – had to differentiate themselves with violence…

Like his previous novel, 10:04, The Topeka School is barely a novel, and like that previous book, that is not necessarily a criticism.  It narrates incidents in the life of a single family – Jonathan, and Jane – who work in a famous psychoanalytic institute in Topeka known simply as The Foundation – and their son Adam.  While the chapters are not in chronological order, they add up to the story of Adam’s coming of age – from a severe concussion when he is 11 through his high school social life, his career as a champion debater and on to his relationship and marriage to Natalia and his role as father to their two children.  Along the way, Jane befriends Sima,  another analyst, then loses that friendship when she becomes a best-selling author while Jonathan has an affair with Sima that nearly destroys the marriage.  To call this a plot is stretching the conventional definition of that term as the incidents are generally related by the various characters (the chapters have different narrators) after the fact.  These are psychologists and the precocious child of psychologists and their main activity is in analyzing themselves, often in the language of psychology.  The narratives are merely evidence of the analysis that interests them.

To the extent that there is an overarching plot, it concerns Darren, a learning-disabled teenager who had been teased and abused by his peers for years and is now being invited to participate in the round of late-senior-year parties for reasons that are cruel, ironic and kind in mixed degrees that Darren himself is unable to parse. Darren will turn every slight into evidence of inclusion in the group and, hungry for approval, act out the fantasies and tensions of the group in an act of violence that is disturbing even though it is thoroughly foreshadowed before it occurs.  Adam and Darren represent a pair of foils to each other as Adam is so celebrated for his intellect but struggles with his won equations of machismo and violence, pride and shame.

All of this narrative is at the service of a series of related themes that almost turn the text into an essay.  The thesis of this essay – that America’s political and social breakdown can be found in linguistic breakdowns that began a generation ago – is hammered home with relative frequency.  The variety of breakdowns in language is impressive:  Adam get’s concussive amnesia in a skateboard accident, he excels in one type of debate in which the point is to speak so quickly no one can follow your argument and in another in which the pretense of sincerity and truth are the keys to victory; he loses his ability to speak coherently at moments of key tension – as do Jonathan, Jane and Darren; his grandfather has not spoken in years – perhaps it is dementia, perhaps something else; his elderly cousin suffers from dementia and walks around her nursing home thinking she is the doctor and consulting with nurses and patients in a Russian none of them understands; the privileged white boys of his high school practice rapping in imitation of their black urban heroes while aping the body language they think of as hip hop and he and Jane have a cute childhood game that involves purposely misremembering the words of a nonsense poem.

Much of this breakdown in language is related to the breakdown in male roles.  The boys in Adam’s high school are unaccountably violent and there is more than one scene in which small violations of macho codes are punished with horrific beatings.  It is this impulse to balance your insecurities with violence that dooms Darren and one feels Adam skating along the edge of such violence throughout the text.  In the final chapter Adam has moved to NY and become a successful poet.  He is married to a Puerto Rican activist (whose brief affair while they were in college nearly cost him his sanity in an earlier chapter) and the father of two girls.  The narrative here centers on two encounters he has with bullying adults – one a finance type who won’t control his child in the playground and who successfully goads Adam into violence and the other a police officer who ludicrously picks on Adam’s daughter during a pro-immigration demonstration.  The incidents serve to let us know that the problems with communication among males relying on macho tropes to get through their day is no longer just an adolescent problem, but is now an adult problem.  There are references to Trump and the resurgence of white supremacy here that seem to locate the success of the current administration in the locker rooms (and debate stages) of Tacoma, Kansas.

While Jane is a major voice in the novel, she is analytically interesting but practically ineffectual.  She is victim of Adam’s belligerence and Jonathan’s betrayal.  There are few other female characters of note.  In the first chapter, Adam’s unnamed girlfriend takes a strong, if passive-aggressive stand against mansplaining, but the Amber who is dating him later in the novel (and seems to be the same person) is mostly a silent sexual partner.  His wife Natalia is deftly painted as strong, independent and outspoken in a few short lines, but the action leaves her behind pretty quickly – even as we suspect she is the future Lerner is hoping to nourish.  

There are gorgeous sentences throughout.  Lerner seems never to have encountered a vocabulary word he did not love, but here they give him a powerful tool way to analyze the inner thoughts of psychoanalysts using their own words.  In the passage above, Darren is de-humanized by the intellectual framework he is placed in, and that happens through out the novel with other characters.  However, those passages are often balanced by deeply felt moments when the same characters are fully human and deeply flawed.