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.

The Wichita Lineman by Dylan Jones

That, for me, is 'Wichita Lineman,' a song I heard as a boy that has stayed with me all my life. I like it now for the same reasons I liked it then. I liked it because it took me to places I hadn't been, to places nowhere near me, places unknown. It was a complete escape. It may have been a song full of longing, full of anxiety and want, yet to me it seemed to announce a vortex of calm.

I love "Wichita Lineman." Who doesn't? It's a perfect song: only sixteen lines long, but perfectly balanced, a song about loneliness and longing on the high prairie in which the wistful lyrics are matched perfectly by the sweep of the music itself. Dylan Jones calls it the perfect imperfect song, because it wasn't finished when songwriter Jimmy Webb sent a demo off to Glen Campbell to see if he liked it. Campbell, knowing a sure thing when he heard it, recorded it within weeks, not waiting for Webb to add to--or perhaps monkey with--what was already one of the finest country songs ever written. And it was huge. Campbell outsold the Beatles that year, 1968, largely thanks to the success of "Wichita Lineman." It's a song that seems divorced from the social upheaval that was coursing through the country in 1968, but it tapped into something timeless about the United States of America, a large and lonely place.

Dylan Jones' book is an ode to "Wichita Lineman," which Jones treasured as a child in the U.K. and only belatedly learned, after years of private regard, that just about everybody in the world likes it, too. The Wichita Lineman is a history of a song, of how the lightning got bottled, and to write that history Jones writes the history of the Webb and Campbell, two men who were thrust together by a kind of destiny. Both grew up poor, in the parts of the country that don't get covered in popular music--Webb in Oklahoma and Campbell in Arkansas--but the buttery polish of both men's styles was formed in the studios of Los Angeles. As Jones describes it, each man was to the other a kind of revelation: while still a young man in Oklahoma, Webb heard one of Campbell's songs on the radio, and was so struck he declared he'd write for the man with that voice one day. And he got his chance when Campbell, hearing a lesser artist's version of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" on his own car radio, slapped the steering wheel and decided he could make it a hit. He did, but it's no surprise that the greatest collaboration between the two of them was the one that Webb wrote specifically with Campbell in mine. (Jones goes on, naturally, to discuss the longstanding partnership between them, which produced a small handful of masterpieces, like another favorite of mine, "Where's the Playground, Susie?")

One of the things I enjoyed most about The Wichita Lineman was learning the history of Campbell's career, which was even more far-reaching than I knew. As a member of the legendary session group called the Wrecking Crew, Campbell had a hand in half of the biggest popular hits of the 1960's; you can hear him playing guitar--he was known as a guitar virtuoso as well as a terrific singer--on "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" and "I'm a Believer." (In fact, because the musicians were rarely credited, it's impossible to know for certain how extensive Campbell's contributions were.) He played on Pet Sounds and briefly subbed for a post-breakdown Brian Wilson on tour with the Beach Boys, in exchange for which Wilson gave Campbell the song "Guess I'm Dumb," maybe his best song not written by Jimmy Webb. Webb, of course, is still alive, and his interview with Jones that ends the book helps put the song in its proper context, but there's a certain mysteriousness to Campbell's career that seems amplified now that he's dead.

As you might expect with any book about a single song, it feels a little padded. Jones' musical knowledge and passion are on display, and his reflections on how "Wichita Lineman" fit into his own personal musical history are part of what makes the book compelling. But you don't have to go far to find him suddenly going on about like, Neu! or Prefab Sprout for pages at a time. Perhaps you couldn't publish it, but one gets the sense that the book might have been better if, like "Wichita Lineman" itself, had done a little less. But I will say this: there just aren't that many songs you wouldn't get tired, if you had to read a whole book about them, of hearing on a loop in your head. That as much as anything is why The Wichita Lineman is successful.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Life was finally starting, Newt thought. Here he was below the border, about to run off a huge horse herd, and in a few days or weeks he would be going up the trail to a place he had barely even heard of. Most of the cowpokes who went north from Lonesome Dove just went to Kansas and thought that was far--but Montana must be twice as far. He couldn't imagine what such a place would look like. Jake had said it had buffalo and mountains, two things he had never seen, and snow, the hardest thing of all to imagine.

Okay, first of all: Three-fourths of Lonesome Dove doesn't even take place in the town of Lonesome Dove on the Texas-Mexico border. The whole point of the massive novel is leaving Lonesome Dove. Two aging Texas Rangers, garrulous Gus McCrae and stern Woodrow McCall, decide to give up their livery stable, which has led to a too-easy life, to lead a final cattle drive all the way from Texas to the Montana, arriving in the rich grasslands with their thousands-strong herd before other homesteaders and ranchers get there for them. Along for the ride are a motley crew of cowpokes: young Newt, who hasn't figured yet out figured out that he's Call's illegitimate son; Deets, the black tracker of preternatural skill; Jake Spoon, an unreliable gambler and womanizer; Lorena, a former prostitute in Lonesome Dove who sees Jake as her ticket to a better life in San Francisco; Dish Boggett, a talented cattle driver who is madly in love with Lorena. The story of these cattle drivers intersects with others: the Arkansas sheriff and his deputy who are looking to hang Jake Spoon, the sheriff's wife, who absconds with a group of rough-and-tumble buffalo hunters, and Gus' old flame Clara, long since settled on the Platte with her now-disabled husband.

Gus is the central character of Lonesome Dove. He's a skilled ranger and lawman, but he prefers to talk, and his incessant joking and chattering is the bane of his laconic partner, McCall. In fact, Gus gives the first couple hundred pages of Lonesome Dove, the part where the "outfit" is making plans for their cattle drive, a kind of broad comic quality that make the sudden death of a young Irish cowboy by a nest of water moccasins even more unsettling. It took me a long time to adjust my expectations for the novel; the juxtaposition of its comic tone and the brutality of the trail felt to sour to me, at times. The nadir of this, for me, was the introduction of a mysterious and barefoot young girl, with almost feral outdoor skills, who takes up with the hapless deputy Roscoe and who is--spoiler alert--almost immediately killed off in the most brutal manner, and not alone. But as the novel goes on, Gus' humor begins to seem more like a reasonable response to a life filled with unpredictable cruelty. The Irishman, the girl, are buried, and the cattle drive moves on.

Lonesome Dove seems, in many ways, like the quintessential western. For one, it's truly epic: 850 pages long and covering several thousand miles, as well as a couple dozen different character viewpoints. It's a snapshot of the American West at a moment when it seems empty, Native Americans driven back, the buffalo thinned out to near-extinction, but before the great droves of settler wagons and cattle drives that Call and McCrae know are coming. Sometimes, the Western tropes are a little too strong. I didn't like the depiction of Blue Duck, the unusually vicious Comanche outlaw who kidnaps Lorena and sells her to a group of Indians and Comancheros to be beaten and raped. Though Lonesome Dove makes some gestures toward ambivalence about Native Americans--Gus is supposed to have a more compassionate demeanor toward them than many of his peers--but Blue Duck seems like a monster straight out of American myth, the kind that has long been used to justify genocide and displacement. And I was troubled by the character of Lorena, too, who is headstrong at first, and who becomes terrified and helpless after her ordeal. Vicious Native Americans, helpless damsels.

But ultimately, I was engrossed by the vividness of the characters, and the sweep of the novel's great drama. The novel gets stronger, I think, the farther the outfit goes, and the wider its scope becomes. It's sort of a marvel, actually, that the novel doesn't falter as it brings in the Arkansas sheriff, July Johnson, or the story of Gus' old love Clara, a headstrong woman who has lost two children and whose husband now has been rendered braindead by the kick of a horse. But the novel is something like Gus and Call themselves: stifled by the lazy, talk-heavy life of a Lonesome Dove horse trader, and needing the great open space of the West in order to thrive. By the time the cattle drive arrives in Montana, it has become a legend in its own right, but the costs have been great: lives lost, men buried in unmarked graves in impossible to find places. Every real Western needs to have a measure of ambivalence about the West, and this is Lonesome Dove's. Has it been worth it, to reach Montana? Is the myth worth the men it leaves behind?

Butcher's Crossing by John Williams

A heavy rumble shook the earth; Andrews's horse started backwards, its ears flattened about the sides of its head.  For an instant Andrews searched the upper air about the southern mountains, thinking that he had heard the sound of thunder; but the rumbling persisted beneath him.  Directly in front of him, in the distance, a faint cloud of dust arose, and blew away as soon as it had arisen.  Then suddenly, out of the shadow, onto that part of the valley still flooded in sunlight, the buffalo emerged.  They ran with incredible swiftness, not in a straight line toward him, but in swift swerves and turns, as if they evaded invisible obstacles suddenly thrust before them; and they swerved and turned as if the entire herd of thirty or forty buffalo were one animal with one mind, a single will--no animal straggled or turned in a direction that was counter to the movement of the others.

William Andrews is the son of a Unitarian minister in Boston; he comes west with money in his pocket looking for a genuine experience with nature.  He ends up in Butcher's Crossing, Kansas, a tiny outpost flush with money from the buffalo hide industry.  He finds himself financing a hunting party to the Rocky Mountains, led by a hypermasculine tracker named Miller, and accompanied by a religious drunk, Charley Hoge, and a truculent skinner named Schneider.  Miller's promise of a secret valley laden with thousands of buffalo turns out to be true, and Miller slowly picks off every single one of the animals, already at this time starting to dwindle from its terrific population.  But his thirst for wiping out the herd presses the party to stay longer than is wise, and soon they're snowed in--not for six weeks, as they expected, but at least six months.

Butcher's Crossing is, among other things, a send-up of Emersonian Transcendentalism.  Like Emerson, Andrews comes out of a Boston Brahmin tradition looking for a real connection with the earth that will provide meaning and freedom from the strictures of civilization:

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought.  It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous.  What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year.

But what Andrews finds on the buffalo hunt is not freedom or hope but the existential indifference of the natural world, with its tendency to diminish the human ego.  The archetype of the "natural man" is not some enlightened Thoreau, but Miller, who kills buffalo not for money but for some deep and dark primeval need.  And Andrews changes, too, but not for the better; the experience manages to empty him in a way he cannot foresee, underscored by a scene in the midst of the snow-covered valley in which, stricken by snowblindness, he loses his sense of direction and his sense of self.  One of the party goes insane; one doesn't make it back at all.

Williams' novels are so different from each other: a western, a campus novel, a Roman historical novel.  But in each his style is indelible, even though it is a kind of unstyle marked by a preference for the most familiar word and few pyrotechnics.  Williams' descriptions of the Rocky Mountains are little more than an inversion of his descriptions of Kansas, "great" and "green" versus "low," "flat," "brown."  In Stoner the style reflects the plainspokenness of the protagonist; here it becomes both chilling and chilly, emphasizing the fundamental difference between Andrews and the natural world he hopes to access.  There is no vocabulary sufficient to describe it; it effaces vocabulary, as it does in the six months Andrews' party spends in the snow barely speaking to each other.

But perhaps the most chilling aspect of Butcher's Crossing is not the slaughter of the buffalo hunt, or the unceasing trauma of the Colorado winter, but what happens--spoiler alert, I guess--when the party returns to Butcher's Crossing.  The market for buffalo hides has bottomed out, and the thousands of hides which they have left stored for safekeeping in Colorado are worth an infinitesimal fraction of what they invested in the operation.  Butcher's Crossing itself is basically a ghost town.  Andrews doesn't need the money, really, but it underscores the futility of his Transcendental dream.  Not only has the experience isolated him, separated him somehow from human life, the failure of the buffalo market precludes the last hope of his successful reintegration into the civilization he didn't know he longed for.  The last image is, like every good cinema Western, of Andrews riding off into the sunset alone.