Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Review: "The Topeka School" by Ben Lerner


Don’t listen to most reviews of Ben Lerner’s third novel The Topeka School. They will most likely describe it as it pertains to its political merits and make it something it is clearly not. This last-minute addition to my reading year of 2019 had me worried before I even opened it, even though I really enjoyed Lerner’s previous two novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. It seemed from a distance like the kind of book I have been trying to avoid since you know what happened at the end of 2016, but thankfully it is much more than that. It is by far Lerner’s weakest outing especially from a stylistic standpoint, but I found this book’s approach to its subject matter (multi-faceted and almost politically ambiguous to an aggravating degree) to be refreshing, although I might not suspect that was the intent Lerner had in mind when he wrote it. Taking place at the tail end of the 20th century a time not as simple as we’d like to believe in 2019, we find Adam, the star debater on a Topeka, Kansas high school debate team, at an odd point in his life as he tries to navigate the masculine roles thrust upon him in his proximal male hierarchy. This is complicated as we learn about the past of his mother Jane, a famous feminist author on the hitlist of the nearby Westboro Baptist Church and his father Jonathan, a psychiatrist with long list of infidelities but with a special knack for getting young boys to open up, one of which is Darren, the loner at Adam’s school whom he has brought into his group of friends. It’s many shifts in time period bring about the book’s most memorable scenes, such as an incident Adam had as a toddler with chewing gum, but they create a dense fog over the proceedings of the book, and by its confusing end, I was still left wanting for more concrete resolutions or enough intrigue to nullify them. A book more interesting than it is actually good. 
Rating: 4/5

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