The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy--even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony. The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al. If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension. His disastrous tonsorial compromise. The migraines.

There are many risks for a young white man growing up in Topeka, Kansas: meth, for one, and the seductive anger of the Westboro Baptist crew right next door, the inchoate white male rage that lurked in the wings of American life until it ascended to power in 2016. For young Adam, these are forces against which others are marshaled: his mother, for instance, who has become famous writing a book of feminist pop psychology; the Foundation, a renowned psychological institute at which his father works, and where Adam and all his friends seem to receive various forms of psychoanalysis; the armor of being loosely connected to other people, to New York and to Judaism. And debate, at which Adam is one of the best in the country. He's widely expected to win the national championship in "extemp," extemporaneous speaking on a revealed subject.

The Topeka School makes high school look absolutely dreary, which it is. In theory, it's a way of channeling raw human attitudes into intelligible speech, of finding control through words, but in practice, it turns out to be just the opposite. In a typical debate, one party wins by "spreading" their opponent, that is, speaking so quickly and introducing so many arguments that the opponent cannot respond to all of them, thus conceding them. It leads to a kind of gibberish intelligible only to the initiated, and which at times resembles senseless glossolalia. It has its echoes in the word salad of nervous breakdowns, of which the characters in The Topeka School have many. Or with the angry outbursts that come on Adam after a severe concussion. It has echoes, too, in the taboo utterances of "The Men," who call to verbally assault Adam's mother for her writings, with rape threats and filthy words. Can the practices which claim to give order to the world--and sensibility and decency--actually lead to brutality? To social degeneration? To Fred Phelps and Donald Trump?

Adam, who, as the implied author cobbles together accounts from his parents to stitch the novel together, turns out more or less OK. (We see him late in the book channeling his uneasy feelings into poetry, another kind of speech and another kind of order.) But he has a shadow in Darren, another boy who isn't quite a friend. Darren is a patient of Adam's father at the Foundation, a troubled kid who goes from being rejected by his peers to being included in a kind of cruel and ironic way, like a mascot. We know from the beginning of the book that Darren commits a shocking act of violence: he breaks a girl's jaw with a pool ball:

What Darren could not make them understand was that he would never have thrown it except he always had. Long before the freshman called him the customary names, before he'd taken it from the corner pocket, felt its weight, the cool and smoothness of the resin, before he'd hurled it into the crowded darkness--the cue ball was hanging in the air, rotating slowly. Like the moon, it had been there all his life.

What separates Darrens from Adams? Something innate, surely. Darren feels it, the anger that exists before the reason for it, symbolized in the cue ball-moon. And Darren doesn't have Adam's intelligence, though perhaps that's less innate and more contingent than one would like to believe. At the end of the novel, an adult Adam sees Darren among the picketers with Phelps' Westboro Baptist cretins. There are Darrens everywhere, Lerner seems to be saying, and sometimes they look freakish and strange, but sometimes they look like rude parents at the playground, and sometimes they look like ICE agents, and sometimes they look like us.

I was really impressed by The Topeka School. It's a book that seems like it has one too many parts--there's the multiple narrators, the presence of Darren (whose connection to Adam is really, in a plot sense, very tenuous), the Foundation, some stuff about Adam's parents' affairs. A lot of that would seem really ungainly, or perhaps extraneous, if the book weren't cinched so tight by its themes: the brutality of white American masculinity, and its manifestation in language. Lerner handles all this with the aplomb of a poet, used to balancing unlike moments against one another to reveal their secret likeness. I think I liked it a little less than Leaving the Atocha Station, if only because that novel is frequently very funny, and The Topeka School isn't. But few other novels, I think, speak to something as urgent and contemporary.