16 The New York Review
utopian possibility within a realistic
world that we recognize as essentially
our own. In the course of the book, Ben
describes situations, whether ordinary
or extraordinary, positive or negative,
that suddenly shift his sense of the
world, like an eerie change of light. On
the evening before a tropical storm is
supposed to hit New York City, Ben
grabs a normally unremarkable, now
precious jar of instant coffee from a su-
permarket shelf and is suddenly aware
of the complex, fragile conditions of its
production, “as if the social relations
that produced the object in my hand
began to glow within it”:
I held the red plastic container,
one of the last three on the shelf,
held it like the marvel that it was:
the seeds inside the purple fruits of
coffee plants had been harvested
on Andean slopes and roasted and
ground and soaked and then dehy-
drated at a factory in Medellín and
vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK
and then driven upstate in bulk to
Pearl River for repackaging and
then transported back by truck to
the store where I now stood read-
ing the label.It might once have seemed well
within the scope of an ambitious novel
to take us to all of these places, intro-
duce us to the coffee growers and har-
vesters and processors and wholesalers
and lay bare the institutional and cor-
porate networks that connect and bind
these characters. Lerner, however, is
writing in a time of doubt about the re-
alist writer’s authority to take us very
far beyond the bounds of his own expe-
rience. 10 : 04 is a scaled-down reinven-
tion of the social novel.
Lerner may not credibly be able to
take us to the Andes, or even to Pearl
River, but if he credibly invents a knowl-
edgeable, articulate, idealistic, rumina-
tive narrator who can acknowledge the
limits of his own perspective, we can
join him in thinking about coffee pro-
duction, as well as overpopulation, Oc-
cupy Wall Street, climate change, and a
lot else. Ben’s most important quality
for this role is his intellectual excitabil-
ity. No object that you’ve held in your
hand may ever have seemed to glow
with revelations about the social rela-
tions that produced it, but it’s easy to
believe such a thing might happen to
Ben.
The Topeka School, Lerner’s third
novel, takes us back into Adam Gor-
don’s childhood and adolescence in
Kansas, and offers what Lerner calls
a “genealogy of his speech.” It turns
out that Adam’s fluency has a history,
was honed in the public school debate
tournaments of Midwestern states and
at parties where, after a certain hour,
the mostly white suburban kids would
gather to have freestyle rap tourna-
ments. Adam is the son of two psy-
chologists, liberal transplants from
New York City, and his family stands
somewhat apart politically from the
conservative-leaning community. He
describes a Topeka of well-armed
households and militant masculinity
in which any two teenage boys meet-
ing for the first time would “as a mat-
ter of course” imagine “exploding each
other’s noses, breaking jaws or limbs
in holds, choking each other out, run-
ning simulations that were mash-ups of
Street Fighter II: Championship Edi-
tion and lived experience.” His class-
mates are mostly affluent (big houses,
boats, neighborhoods with man-made
lakes) and college-bound, and Lerner
emphasizes the startling levels of ca-
sual, vicious violence among the more
coddled of American youth.
In this environment, Adam’s love
of words is channeled into combat-
ive forms. He loves to read and write
poems, but predictably, “poetry made
you a pussy.” The debate team is
marginally more acceptable: at least
there are winners and losers, and you
can style yourself as a kind of verbal
“bully, quick and vicious and ready to
spread an interlocutor with insults at
the smallest provocation.”
Meanwhile, his skill at
freestyling goes a long way
toward redeeming Adam’s
social status. Though em-
barrassing in retrospect (“a
small group of privileged
crackers often arrhythmi-
cally recycling the genre’s
dominant and to them to-
tally inapplicable clichés”),
freestyling “transmuted his
prowess as a public speaker
and aspiring poet into some-
thing cool.”
Fighting and guns were,
at the time, part of the air
Adam breathed—just how
much they would signify
politically did not occur to
teenaged Adam, though
it’s very much on the older
narrator’s mind. There are
actually two Adams in The
Topeka School: the middle-
aged present-day narrator
writes about his teenage self
growing up in Kansas. Adam
is now the father of two
young daughters, married
and living in Brooklyn and
writing at least part of this
novel, he tells us, from the
room where his daughters
sleep. His mood is darker
and tone more urgent than in Leaving
the Atocha Station. He’s reaching into
his deep past not only for the sources
of his fluency, but also for the sources
of a political crisis—Trump’s presi-
dency—that has blindsided him. When
Adam was a high school senior, in 1996,
presidential candidate Bob Dole made
a surprise appearance at one of Adam’s
debate team’s award ceremonies, pos-
ing with them for a photo. The senator,
adult Adam tells us in rueful deadpan,
“was less than a month away from being
crushed by Bill Clinton, a landslide vic-
tory for the Democrat that would con-
firm that cultural conservatism was
giving, had all but given, way to the
reign of more liberal baby boomers.”Adam doesn’t narrate this story by
himself. Alternating chapters are told
by his parents, Jonathan and Jane Gor-
don, who moved to Topeka in the 1970s
for a fellowship at the Foundation, a
prestigious psychiatric institute. Lerner
himself grew up in Topeka, the son of
psychologists from the East Coast, as a
recent profile of him in The New York
Times Magazine reminds us.
As autobiographical parental char-
acters, the Gordons seem the very op-
posite of another great set of literary
Midwestern parents, Evan Connell’s
gently satirized, emotionally repressed,bourgeois couple, based on his own
parents, in Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr.
Bridge (1969). To satirize characters,
however gently or affectionately, is
to condescend to them, and Adam—
or Lerner—conspicuously doesn’t.
The Gordons are articulate, self-
questioning, politically engaged, flu-
ent in the languages of psychology and
emotional expression. They speak for
themselves reliably, organize their own
stories. Lerner never qualifies their
self- understanding or suggests that he,
or Adam, knows Jonathan and Jane
any better than they know themselves.
Lerner again is not just interested in
creating the illusion but in drawing our
attention to the process of creating lit-erary illusion, which he does especially
beautifully through the character of
Adam’s mother. Jane doesn’t just begin
speaking. She begins her first section
by speaking to someone, a “you” whose
identity is at first not clear: “Do you re-
member how two winters ago it turned
out that I hadn’t bought our Florida
tickets... ?” Her narrative is full of
conversational touch points (“Do you
know what I mean?”), and she seems
to be reminiscing in the same room
with an interlocutor, who, it emerges, is
her adult son. “You can’t really remem-
ber what Sima was like back then... ”
“You and Jason were of course best
friends... ” “Dad put on this video for
you...”
In her second section, Jane has
changed, or at least her style of narra-
tion is a little different. “Dad” is now
Jonathan, and there is no “you” to
whom she is addressing her story. No
one interjects an observation. She is
talking to us, her readers. She regis-
ters changes in the weather. (“The rain
had stopped by the time we parked....
The humidity was gone, the air washed
cool.”) She has become a character in a
novel. Adam is writing her, has written
her. He has used his powers of fluency
to create another fictional person like
himself. The son has given birth to the
mother—or is it that he has possessed
her?At one point, Jane tells a story of
her failed attempts to quit her uncon-
scious habit of nodding in time to her
patients’ talking, and she concludes, “I
even developed something like pride
in the subtle nodding, the way an ath-
lete might—a little ritual that helps you
ke ep you r rhy t h m at t he f re e t h row l i ne,
for instance, an analogy I would never
use.” She would never use the analogy
but she just used it. Whose analogy is
it? Adam the author’s? Ben Lerner the
author’s? And where is the author?
In the analogy? In Jane? It’s a liter-
ary version of impossible perspective,
which Lerner makes both uncanny and
comical. The son has taken possession
of the mother and left his telltale bite
mark: a sports metaphor.
Jane and Jonathan had
expected to return to New
York when their two-year
fellowship was over, but they
made friends at the Foun-
dation, enjoyed the quiet,
bought a house they could
easily afford, and stayed.
“We were treated with cu-
riosity rather than suspicion
by the locals,” Jonathan tells
us, “and even though I was
a Jewish long-haired hippie
from New York, I was good at
drawing people out.” He de-
velops a specialty in treating
“reticent Midwestern boys
and men.” Over the years,
he sees an increasing num-
ber of teenage boys who are
withdrawn and defiant for
no obvious reason that their
families can identify, “whose
suffering wasn’t clearly re-
lated to their circumstances,
or whose circumstances were
most notable for their nor-
mality—intelligent middle-
class white kids from stable
homes who were fine until
they weren’t.”
Jane too is concerned
about the boys and men of
Topeka, and about Adam’s
growing up in the macho-ish culture of
their adopted city. While Adam is in
elementary school, she writes a hugely
successful book of popular psychol-
ogy on relationships, aimed at women.
Although the book is not political, it is
interpreted by some readers, or their
husbands, as crypto-feminist. After she
appears on Oprah, she starts receiv-
ing anonymous phone calls from men
threatening violence, as well as com-
ments from actual men at the super-
market who come up to her to say,
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, home-
wrecker,” and, “I feel sorry for your
husband.” This may be apt, as Jonathan
himself struggles with Jane’s success,
which plays a part in an affair he has
that roils their marriage during Ad-
am’s high school years. Sexism is not
only for conservative Kansas; it’s been
known to occur among liberal New
York–born psychiatrists as well. At a
family dinner where Adam relentlessly
talks over his girlfriend every time she
tries to say something, Jane struggles to
get through the meal by trying to think
of “my bully of a son as a vulnerable
young man passing through a compli-
cated social and hormonal stage.”There’s one other significant charac-
ter in The Topeka School. In between
the Gordons’ chapters are short, itali-Stephen^LernerBen Lerner and his brother, Matt, Phoenix, Arizona , 19 85