The Atlantic - October 2019

THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 41

BOOKS

His rants at

his parents

often take the

form of “an

overwhelm-

ing barrage

of ridiculous

but somehow

irrefutable

arguments.”

THE TOPEKA SCHOOL

BEN LERNER

FSG

the most successful men think calmly and talk
calmly, where emotions require verbal “process-
ing,” and where any ado lescent outbursts are fol-
lowed by “think[ing] along with” his parents about
the causes. At the same time, he is immersed in the
teenage masculinity of late-’90s Topeka; among
his peers, the most expressible emotions are rage
or disdain, and the lingua franca is physical vio-
lence or torrents of freestyle rap in an absurd—if
earnest—appropriation of a black culture they have
no direct contact with.
At school, Adam falls in with the kids of the
Foundation faculty; the boys among them have
a tense and violent relationship with the sons
of blue-collar Tope kans. The estrangement of
these two groups pre figures the elite-versus-real-
America animosity that now dominates political
and social rhetoric—though what’s striking is how
similarly angry and anxious about the demands
of masculinity all these young white men seem.
Adam often feels lost and enraged for reasons he
can’t quite explain. His behavior at home grows so
explosive that his parents insist he either see a ther-
apist or learn biofeedback methods for regulating
his emotions. He opts for the biofeedback.
For the most part, Adam navigates both worlds
reasonably well, verbal virtuoso that he is, a state
debate champion. He can deploy “his Foundation
vocab ulary” and freestyle rap with fluidity and
abandon, words “unfold[ing] at a speed he could
not consciously control.” Adam is especially gifted
at extemporaneous argument, which has become
his way of aggressively dominating others. His
rages at his parents often take the form of “an
overwhelming barrage of ridiculous but somehow
irrefutable arguments,” and his attitude during
interscholastic tournaments is competitive to the
point of maliciousness. At the same time, debate
is a route to the flow state he craves:

He passed, as he often passed, a mysterious

threshold. He began to feel less like he was

delivering a speech and more like a speech was

delivering him, that the rhythm and into nation

of his presentation were beginning to dictate its

content, that he no longer had to organize his

arguments so much as let them flow through him.

Again and again in The Topeka School, charac-
ters fall into a kind of glossolalia, or “word salad,”
the breakdown of grammar commonly observed
in religious rapture or extreme states of psychosis.
Glossolalia is either pure communication, the pres-
ence of the divine in language, or terrible babble,
the impulse to be understood and to understand
pushed to the point of implosion. Adam trains
for the national speech-and-debate tournament
with a former champion also from Topeka, Peter
Evanson, who is even better at verbal combat than

Adam—and who will later “be a key architect of

the most right-wing governorship Kansas has

ever known ... an important model for the Trump

administration.” He is a master of what’s called

“the spread,” or the act of making arguments and

jamming in facts at such an unintelligibly fast pace

that an opponent can’t possibly respond to them

all effectively. In his lessons for Adam, we see the

beginnings of a national political glossolalia:

I want quick swerves into the folksy ... After you

go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the

Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on

that.” I don’t care if they’re not real sayings, just

deliver them like they’re tried-and-true. Say “tried

and true.” Say “ain’t” if you want. You can go

agrammatical so long as they know it’s a choice,

that it’s in quotes. Interrupt your highbrow flu-

ency with bland sound bites of regional decency ...

Deliver little tautologies like they’re proverbs.

Looking back on a scene of himself sparring

with Evanson, the older Adam—now a writer living

in New York—comments that the younger Adam

will go on to “attempt this genealogy of his speech,

its theaters and extremes,” referring to the book we

are reading. If the novel is a chronicle of his coming-

of-age in language, the suggestion is that it is also

a larger semantic origin story, about faux-populist,

frenetic Trumpian rhetoric, and the subset of artic-

ulate, angry men who helped cultivate it.

But why are these men so angry? Like Jonathan’s

“lost boys,” they seem to have plenty of advantages—

so what is the rage about? In the book, a Foundation

analyst offers an explanation:

[Men are told] that they are individuals, rug-

ged even, but in fact they are emptied out, iso-

late, mass men without a mass, although they’re

not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys,

Peter Pans, man-children, since America is

adolescence without end, boys without religion

on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the

other; they don’t even have a father—President

Carter!— to kill or a father to tell them to kill the

Jew; they have no Jew; they are libidinally driven

to mass surrender without anything to surrender

to; they don’t even believe in money or in science,

or those beliefs are insufficient; their country has

fought and lost its last real war; in a word, they

are overfed; in a word, they are starving.

This diagnosis is compelling but unsatisfying,

partly because it ignores how directed white male

rage is: It has targets, and those targets bespeak

something more than godlessness or hunger

or exist ential emptiness. They betray anxiety—

anxiety about power. After Amber jumps out of

the boat and swims away at the beginning of the