In 'Topeka School,' an author finds his voice with flawless precision
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Topeka, Kansas. Photo by David Wilson/Flickr
By Joe McCarthy
What if you mapped your speech patterns, tried to trace all the variations in pitch, your favored words and phrases, back to their origin points? It would be a quixotic journey, ending in a tangle of familial, cultural and social influences and uncanny imprints from random moments.
That's the ostensible quest of Ben Lerner's brilliant "The Topeka School," a fictionalized version of the events, people, and ideologies that shaped his voice as a writer, father and person. Along the way, the book includes profound, moving and hilarious meditations on memory, masculinity, white privilege and a lot more.
The book alternates between different narrators, and jumps back and forth across decades.
There's Adam, whose voice is being mapped out as he learns nursery rhymes, relearns to speak after a brutal concussion, participates in rap battles and competes in debate tournaments. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author who gets threatening phone calls from angry men. Adam's dad Jonathan discusses his approach to psychiatry and his struggle with fidelity, while Darren, one of his patients, is addressed in the third person, an unstable outcast who gets ironically folded into Adam's friend group and becomes a key fulcrum of the plot.
There's also the voice of Lerner himself, who breaks the fourth wall to describe his present circumstances and convey his intentions as an author.
The book takes place primarily in Topeka and revolves in part around The Foundation, the psychiatric facility Adam's parents work at. But there are detours to New York and Taipei to uncover shreds of the past.
As the narrative builds, phrases and words keep reappearing, ghost-like, phantom links connecting different scenes and characters. These repetitions gather a symbolic density, showing how Lerner's mind coheres around a subjective framework. Sometimes a repetition will spiral into a collage of echoed impressions, an extended prose poem of subjectivity blasted open.
On a sentence level, the book is flawless. Lerner brings his precision as a poet to craft marvelously light paragraphs that are stuffed with insight. The plot is equally gripping, even if disjointed, because the scenes are written with a freshness and an immediacy that bring you fully into the drama. There's no dead space, not a single extraneous word.
Throughout the book, the narrators return to pivotal moments that influenced how they think and speak: Adam sizing up a rival "man-child" in a supermarket, considering "the spread" in a debate round, or sitting in a sensory deprivation box fearing a migraine; Jane parsing the breakdown of a friendship and her turbulent relationship with fame; Darren walking 20 miles hungover back to Topeka after getting a taste of friendship; Jonathan taking acid in the MET or passing a beautiful woman on a park bench.
The book is about voice, but silences abound. The silence of dementia and concussions, losing consciousness and death, humiliations and betrayals.
A short story forms a thematic chord as it gets chopped up and recycled in different sections. An everyman takes a mysterious pill from a museum, swallows it on a whim, and has a breakdown at a zoo, where he's suddenly able to hear the speech of animals who regard him with withering contempt. The magic pill, the sudden and frightening knowledge it brings, a sense of self that's disintegrating: these are the ingredients of self transformation, Lerner suggests, the incidents that rearrange everything.
Everyone in the book takes a magic pill of some sort that unravels their sense of self: romance, fame, infidelity, drugs. It's what sets them apart, but makes them interchangeable. It's a rite of passage that dissolves boundaries while creating ineluctable distinctions. It's a feeling of being lost and found, of speaking your voice but straining to hear it. It's Topeka, New York, Taipei. It's everywhere at once, but totally unplaceable.
Joe McCarthy is a writer in Brooklyn.
