Ben Lerner, The Topeka School, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2019
By Peter Hechtman
Book Club
Peter Hechtman
The bare bones of The Topeka School are that Jane and Johnathan Gordon, clutching their new graduate degrees in psychology, are transported by the churning of the 1970s academic labor market from their Brooklyn homes to Topeka, Kansas, to work at The Foundation, referred to as a “Mayo Clinic for the Mind.”
Over the course of the next twenty-odd years, they will raise their red-diaper baby, Adam, in the reddest of red states. They will also experience differing degrees of success. Jane will produce a book featuring a feminist critique of the family that is sanctified by Oprah, while Jonathan continues to apply his clinical skills to the important but uncelebrated task of helping a generation of “lost boys.”
This is a novel that critics seem to adore. They have taken the basic story as a literary Christmas tree to be decorated with choice post-modernist adornments. Thus we read that the novel is “about” toxic masculinity (aka male rage) or we are told that it is about the disintegration of speech.
There is no question that instances of both these phenomena appear in the novel, but whether they cohere into major themes that affect or alter the trajectory of the Gordon family I will leave to other readers.
Nevertheless, any family, real or fictional, must interact with the world outside their home. For Lerner, this world appears increasingly Trumpian, with its attacks on women, its ethnic/class-linked violence, its hyper-partisanship and its twisting of language into something both incomprehensible and hateful.
Jane’s triumph has become a millstone around her neck. Her telephone constantly rings with violent threats for her anti-family writings, and her public appearances are dogged with incendiary taunts from Bible-thumping fanatics. She refers to these callers as “the men.”
But where Lerner has admirably succeeded is in his description of the assault on language. Adam is a nerd, and in American high schools the class struggle masquerades as a war between jocks and nerds. Adam’s nerdiness is expressed through his role as the leading figure in his high school debating team. In a brilliantly realized scene, Adam both describes and encounters the use of “the spread” as a debating tactic. Those of you old enough to remember high school debating as it was in the 1950s and 60s might think that debating was an admirably democratic exercise in which young people were taught how to logically and rationally organize their arguments in order to persuade the audience or their opponents of their case. No longer so. The spread involves use of high-speed “forced speech” to drop so many ideas on the table that the opponent is certain to lose points by failing to respond to all of them.
Something is wrong with this. The adornment of eloquence has been turned into a supersonic word salad.
I believe The Topeka School to be an intelligent and thoughtful book that is worthy of your attention.