Written in the voices of Ivy-bound high school senior Adam Gordon and his psychologist parents, the novel traces Adam’s struggle with the “vacuum at the heart of privilege” that drains the life of upper-middle class white teenagers in 1990s Topeka, Kansas.
Unlike “Atocha” and “10:04,” “The Topeka School” has a plot that approaches normality. Yet in others, it pushes his struggle with authentic expression further than ever before. In some ways, “The Topeka School” is Lerner’s most conventional work.
What unites these novels with Lerner’s poetry is a distinctive voice: one ironically detached from the possibility of genuine expression, yet also skeptical of its own scepticism, yearning for a collective lyric.
His second, “10:04,” wrestles with the ethics of creation and procreation under late capitalism through a character who, also like Lerner, is a Brooklyn novelist dealing with the surprise success of his first book. His first novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” documents the struggle for artistic authenticity of a young poet who, like Lerner, graduated from Brown and travels to Madrid on a writing fellowship. With five books of slippery and ruminative fiction and poetry under his belt, Ben Lerner has established himself as an emerging postmodern writer. Wearing an ill-fitting suit and his father’s tie, Adam lapses into a glossolalic fit, his speech propelling itself forward, “stretched by speed and intensity until he felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form.” This ordinary, uncanny moment is characteristic of Lerner’s novel and his kaleidoscopic and often brilliant inquiry into the power of language in American society.
In Ben Lerner’s novel, “The Topeka School,” protagonist Adam Gordon finds himself thrown into a similar state of existential flux in a less likely location: a high school debate tournament. Looking at the distorted image, what he finds is something shifting that lapses “Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up / Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape.” In “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery ‘49 stands in a gallery in Vienna and contemplates the self, both as it appears in a painting by Parmigiano and in his own poetry.
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