The Atlantic - October 2019

40 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by ALEXEI VELLA

BOOKS

Boy, Uninterrupted

Ben Lerner, portraitist of talkative men,

explores the roots of white male rage.

BY JORDAN KISNER

T

HE TOPEKA SCHOOL, Ben Lerner’s third novel, begins

with a self-aware joke. Adam Gordon, Lerner’s protagonist—

who also narrates Lerner’s acclaimed first novel, Leaving the

Atocha Station—is sitting in a boat, talking. He’s 17, a speech-

and- debate whiz and an aspiring poet living in Topeka, Kansas.

It’s the middle of the night and he’s with his girlfriend, Amber,

monologuing passionately about something or other, when he suddenly looks

around and realizes that he’s sitting in the boat alone. She has jumped over-

board and swum away, and he didn’t even notice.

Men talking—specifically young white male poets from Kansas talking—

have been a fixture of Lerner’s novels. Lerner, a white male poet from Kansas,

even gave the name Ben to the narrator of his sec-

ond novel, 10:04, in addition to endowing him with

roughly his own biography. Both earlier books fea-

ture the interior monologues and exterior deal-

ings of Lerner-types. Both are also ironic, formally

experimental, skeptical of their narrators while

deeply enmeshed in their particular way of seeing

the world. And both books are beautifully, exasper-

atingly, transcendently wordy. In Atocha Station,

an extremely stoned Adam—again monologuing—

marvels, before passing out, at “language becom-

ing the experience it described.” In 10:04, Ben is

the kind of guy who admits that he cried on a park

bench by referring to “a mild lacrimal event.”

So it is funny and welcome to open The Topeka

School and find Adam talking so fluently and

intent ly that he doesn’t notice his girlfriend’s escape.

The scene signals a return of familiar themes in

Ler ner’s work—an obsession with language, a par-

ticular genus of American male subjectivity—and

signals that he is confronting these subjects in a

more direct and critical way. The Topeka School

trains the reader’s eye on the dramas and dangers

of being a person—or a nation—enthralled, bom-

barded, and impris oned by rhetoric.

One of the hallmarks of Lerner’s fiction is the

way that it brings a single consciousness into col-

lision with broad sociopolitical movements. The

backdrop of Atocha Station is the Iraq War, already

souring globalism, America in decline. In 10:04, it

is Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Sandy, and grow-

ing questions in the Obama years about whether an

American “we,” in a Whitman esque sense, is still

possible. In The Topeka School, Ler ner writes from

the vantage of 2019, and from the premise that the

collective is broken and common discourse has

been derailed. The implicit bid of the book is that

exploring myopic white male monologuists, sim-

mering with rage in the Midwest in the late 1990s,

might shed light on today’s America.

The main action of The Topeka School takes

place during Adam’s final year of high school, in

1997. He is the son of two psychologists, Jonathan
      and Jane, who are members of a famous psycho-
      analytic institute called the Foundation, some-
      thing like a “Mayo Clinic for the mind.” Jane’s
      research—which remains vague but concerns
      romantic relationships— has made her nationally
      famous. (Lerner’s mother, Harriet Lerner, a clini-
      cal psychologist, rose to national prominence after
      writing a book about women’s anger that sold mil-
      lions of copies.) Jonathan is a therapist primarily for
      disaffected young white men of privilege, teenag-
      ers who seem to have everything but who suddenly
      turn angry, sullen, withdrawn, violent. Jonathan
      calls them the “lost boys.”
      Adam isn’t one of those boys, but he strad-
      dles two ways of being. He is part of the hyper-
      intellectual, Freudian world of his parents, where