This passage soars; it is evocative and it rings true; I love it. And The Topeka School is full of little flights like these, often referencing each other. The “profound truth” statement introduced here, for example, is mentioned probably twenty more times in the novel amidst other bursts of thought. Lerner is almost like a comedian perfecting a special, finding as many moments as possible to call his audience’s attention back to a previous point and make them see the continuity. One gets the impression that his ability to stitch all of these ideas together into a beautiful patchwork is at the heart of his writing genius; it would come as no surprise that he was a national debate champion in high school even if it wasn’t dealt with at length in the novel.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: the main character of the novel is Ben Lerner, except his name is Adam Gordon. The novel is autofictional, I guess, which means that some version of everything that happens probably happened to Lerner in real life. There are also moments where he openly breaks the fourth wall, like when he remarks, apropos of nothing, that it feels dangerous to fictionalize his daughter’s names. I don’t generally like stuff like this in novels; it feels gross, vaguely masturbatory, even more so than Lerner’s declaration that the fiction-Lerner is a master at giving oral sex. But I have to admit it is executed well here. Each of the main characters (Adam Gordon, his mom, his dad, and Darren) are drawn in extreme realistic detail which would not be possible if Lerner didn’t have close real-life models for them.

I said earlier that Lerner writes beautifully when he deals with abstract ideas. The problem is that this is all he seems interested in writing about. I’ll give you an example. In one scene, Adam goes grocery shopping with his mom and grandmother. Adam is a typical suburban white boy of the nineties, so he spends the shopping trip devising rhymes—“I’m the quicker picker upper when it comes to your mom”—for freestyle battles. Then he sees another boy coming down the aisle with his mother. He and this boy happen to have both taken part in a brawl at a friend’s party, on opposite sides. They stare at each other, trying to look intimidating, and their mothers, assuming they are friends from school, start to talk. What a great idea for a scene! This interaction that encapsulates modern suburban America, surface-level politeness obscuring an undercurrent of adolescent male rage! I love this idea. However, Lerner lets this scene play for just a moment before doing something I am going to call The Lerner Slide. The Lerner Slide is when an author, unsure of their ability to hold their reader’s attention with a simple scene, slides into abstraction and begins to explain and ultimately obfuscate what they’re trying to convey. Consider this passage:

“‘You must be very proud,’ the [rival’s] mother said, looking at Rose, who said she was.”

What’s gonna happen next? Will either of the boys say anything; will their parents’ shared delusion be challenged, or will it assert itself, supplanting their own? Actually, neither:

“For, since swallowing the magic pill, he understood the language of the products. (The film is in slow motion, but only to emphasize the speed, as if events would otherwise unfold at an incomprehensible rate)...a kind of putty, a kind of gum, an abstract stuff out of which they’d have to make new languages, new bodies…Human history, like the history of the individual, can be understood as a slow passage through conflicts of a sexually aggressive nature…And finally, an intern pushing the metal show box: see the cow, the purple of the hide barely perceptible…[this goes on].”

What you just got a taste of is a nearly page-long paragraph full of images and abstractions, all of which are callbacks or references to something previous, which fails to do the one thing the reader wants: tell us what happens next. The Lerner Slide entails giving the reader a bunch of abstract poetic ideas, themes, and images that are associated in the author’s mind with the scene instead of writing the actual scene itself and bringing it to a satisfying conclusion. Writing this, I am struck by its similarity to “the spread” , an actual tactic used in high school and college debate wherein debaters speak incredibly quickly, trying to maximize the number of arguments instead arguing one in a cogent way, which Lerner seems to repudiate in the novel. What may not have occurred to Lerner is that his way of writing, throwing as many abstract ideas and references at the reader as possible in association with a scene instead of fully writing the scene itself, is the fictional equivalent of the spread. Once a debate kid, always a debate kid, I guess.

Okay, finally, on to politics. What do I mean when I say that I find the politics of this book deeply annoying? Well, maybe I can illustrate this with a brief plot synopsis. Adam Gordon and his parents, two psychologists, live in Topeka, Kansas. The plot follows their interactions with—there’s no better term for it, unfortunately—toxic masculinity, which manifests itself both in the infidelity of Adam’s father and his own outbursts at his mother, freestyling and drinking and drug use, and antagonistic debate style. At no point in the novel is any manifestation of male strength shown as anything other than damaging or counterproductive. Adam defends his mother from “God hates Fags” protesters by trying to fight them, and this action is treated as both futile in stopping the protesters and also sexist towards his mother by treating her as if she must be defended. Later, a grown-up Adam gets in an altercation with another father at a playground, whose son is a typical masculine bully; this is again portrayed as a counterproductive, even pathetic, action. Ultimately, Adam’s only moment of heroism seems to come at the very end, when he resists the urge to fight with a “heavy, broad-shouldered, white” police officer at a protest, instead humiliating him with language. The last line of the book: 

“I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.”

At this point it is probably clear why I don’t like the message this book is pushing. Aggression is one of the primary tools men have at their disposal. Aggression is not always “toxic”. At times, it can be a profound force for good. Despite what many in the modern world would have you believe, a good man should be able to access and act on aggression when necessary. I feel bad for a sensitive young man who might pick up this book and glean from it that he should walk down the street without saying anything while his girlfriend is getting catcalled, lest he infantilize her by treating her like she needs to be protected. Such a man might have problems finding a girlfriend.

However, Lerner is too smart and too good of a writer for this to be the only message of his book. The character of Darren Eberheart is the salvation of this novel. Darren is a loner, a gun-obsessed Midwestern manchild. He is stupid; in fact he is developmentally disabled in some way vague enough not to garner sympathy. He is violent and aggressive, obsessed with not being a pussy. He is white, ugly, and out-of-shape, like the cop Lerner-Gordon humiliates in the final scene of the book. He is in many ways the obscene caricature of the Midwestern Trump supporter coastal liberals permit themselves only in the privacy of their own minds.

  And yet he is the most sympathetic character in the novel. I won’t give away why (this review has gone on for long enough) but Lerner treats this character with such compassion despite an obvious distaste for what he represents. The story of his character, a story rarely told in fiction today, makes The Topeka School for me. Despite The Lerner Slide and the “toxic masculinity”, Darren Eberheart makes the book great.

PS: I get the impression, despite the fact that Lerner never openly states it, that in these freestyle battles he autofictionally recounts Lerner said the n-word. Lerner nods to it, noting the “offensiveness of their vocabulary”, but never says it outright. Probably afraid for his career. A good instinct, too, considering this book was published in 2019. How strange is it that an author can describe the humiliation of a developmentally disabled man at length, including abandoning him in the woods and encouraging him to fuck a blackout drunk girl, but cannot have a white sympathetic character say the n-word in a rap battle?