Ben Lerner’s latest novel “The Topeka School” depicts life in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas. Lerner, a professor of English at Brooklyn College has written two novels, three books of poetry and also nonfiction. “The Topeka School” illustrates a case study of middle America, its complexities and its faults. “The Topeka School” was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2019.
The book centers around the three members of the Gordon family: parents Jane and Johnathan, and son Adam. However, the novel begins with Topeka teen Darren Eberheart in police custody, after having assaulted a female peer with a cue ball. Darren’s high school experience – an extremely troubled one – is shown oppositional to Adam’s. Adam is a debate champion, who then attends Columbia, while the longest scenes with Darren depict him in therapy with Adam’s dad, Johnathan, at the psychiatric institute. Darren ended up weaponizing the billiard ball after becoming fed up with his male “friends,” who had recently abandoned Darren miles outside of town, leaving him to walk back to Topeka, scared and alone. Notably, Adam was among the boys who chose to leave Darren alone outside of town. This situation adds a great deal to stereotypes about the often assumed simplicity of “the flyover states,” such as Kansas. The bullying Darren endures causes readers to sympathize with him, despite his violence, and Adam’s role as complacent in this bullying denounces his reputation as a bright young man, bound for the Ivy League. The complexity of the setting in “The Topeka School” works to emphasize how even small communities possess multitudes.
The setting of the novel is distinctly white America. This becomes especially noticeable within a chapter narrated by Johnathan. He spent a few years of his youth during the 1960s abroad in Taipei, as his father was a diplomat. After one of Johnathan’s classmates degrades a local man, “The farmer, whose life, or at least livelihood, was destroyed, showed up, to everyone’s amazement, at the International School the next day, screaming, crying.” The farmer proceeds to ask for an apology, which baffles the students. This scene works to not only vilify teenage American boys, but to contrast Taipei with the primary setting of the book, Topeka, Kansas. The several white, male characters in “The Topeka School” face no threat at home in Topeka, no discomfort; they act accordingly.
In this way, “The Topeka School” feels like a sketch of what it was like to be a white man in middle America approaching the 21st century. The only main female character in the story, Adam’s mother Jane, is characterized as being largely at odds with men. Jane wrote a successful book about relationships and toxic masculinity, for which multitudes of disgruntled men hate harass her, claiming she has ruined their lives. Jane seems to be trapped in the male-dominated world of Kansas, where everyone incorrectly assumes her husband to be “Dr. Gordon,” and offers him the check, despite her being much more successful. Jane also serves as a definitive anchor for her son Adam.
In one of the book’s most stressful scenes, Adam, at school in New York, learns that his girlfriend has cheated on him while studying abroad. Adam calls his mom, Jane, in a state of fury and distress. This scene articulates Adam’s position, straddling the generational divide between child and adult. Adam displays his independence by virtue of the fact that he has gone to study at Columbia, but he also shows his dependence in how his knee-jerk reaction is to call his mother crying after receiving bad news. These pages acutely remind readers of the in-between nature of young adults, college students especially.
Adam attending school in New York also stands for a sort of familial return to the metropolitan area. Jane and Johnathan both grew up in New York before relocating to Topeka to work at the psychiatric institute, referred to as the Foundation. Adam’s eastward progression feels like a contradiction to the portrait of the intricacy of life in Kansas. Topeka is implicitly not enough for the aspirational young man, though being a small fish in the big pond of New York City does not allow Adam to reign in the way that he did in his hometown.
Lerner adds great depth to every member of the Gordon family, highlighting the complexity that each individual household handles. Though most of the book addresses interfamilial dynamics, the nuances among these humans remind readers that communities across the country are complex and contradictory in their interwoven natures.