February 13, 2020 17
cized sections that stick closely to the
perspective of Adam’s classmate Dar-
ren Eberheart. Darren is intellectually
disabled. He has most of his life been
openly mocked by other students in
the way Adam most fears and spends
his life trying to avoid. Darren has
something like the opposite of Adam’s
conspicuous gift for flowing speech;
Darren’s speech has long drawn atten-
tion to itself by being slow and halting:
And then Mrs. Lewis demands he
read aloud from How the Grinch
Stole Christmas! in fourth grade,
sound it out, we can wait all day,
the laughter, then Coach Stemple
grabs him by the face mask during
tryouts in seventh and throws him
to the ground for being dumb as
shit, ears ringing, cut-grass smell.Adam’s strange fluency is analogous
to Darren’s strange, unassimilated
hesitancy and simplicity. After years
of being shunned, Darren is surprised
to find himself welcomed into Adam’s
social circle during their senior year,
where his partying with the other kids
will lead to an act of violence for which
Adam still feels culpable all these years
later, a culpability that shades into his
general, diffuse sense of culpability for
the current political crisis.
On the debate team, Adam was mas-
tering the kinds of skills that would
soon bring his country low. His debate
coach teaches Adam subtle linguistic
and physical gestures to manipulate
the judges. “You’re giving fast and
fluent speeches from left on the spec-
trum and you’re going to easily carry
judges who share that orientation,” he
tells Adam.
But imagine you’re running for
president and now you’re in a
swing state. You’re an hour or two
outside of Pittsburgh, and while
you need to be intelligent, you
need to be winning hearts as much
as minds. What you have in your
favor is Kansas. You have Midland
American English. I want quick
swerves into the folksy.... I want
you saying, right after some hyper-
eloquent riff about Yeltsin break-
ing a promise, “Now, in Kansas,
we call that a lie.”Topeka, in other words, has a politics
problem as well as a masculinity prob-
lem; it’s less than fifteen years away
from
the most right-wing governorship
Kansas has ever known, oversee-
ing radical cuts to social services
and education, ending all funding
for the arts, privatizing Medicaid,
implementing one of the most di-
sastrous tax cuts in America’s his-
tory, an important model for the
Trump administration.It feels, sometimes, like the derang-
ing effects of the national crisis have
turned middle-aged Adam into a for-
lorn and slightly mad detective, search-
ing his own past—because where else
to look?—for clues to the political mal-
practice that’s being perpetrated on the
country. Growing up in Kansas during
the conservative revolution, Adam was
at the scene of the crime. White, male,
and affluent, he matches the suspects’
description. He even appeared in a
newspaper photo with Bob Dole, re-
ceiving a trophy for excellence in argu-
ing points he didn’t necessarily believe
on subjects he didn’t know much about.
Is he a culprit? An accessory?
“At some difficult-to-determine
point,” Adam says, “among middle-
class white boys in the Middle West,
fights, instead of ending when a com-
batant hit the ground, took on new life
there.” Describing a fight that breaks
out among Adam’s friends and a couple
of students from a rival school, Lerner
writes:They felt at once profoundly numb
and profoundly ecstatic to be
young and inflicting optional [op-
timal?] damage on each other...
there was a second-order thrill in
knowing you could kick someone
in the chest without emotion.Adam and Darren are the only To-
peka boys to speak. The ordinary,
not-strange, much-worried-about Mid-
western boys, the kind that make up
most of Adam’s crew and Jonathan’s
clientele, stay silent: it’s striking that we
don’t hear them, or even see them up
close very much. It is left to Jonathan
to describe their symptoms, Darren to
describe their cruelties, and Adam to
gloss how they feel. But can he? Should
he? Has he personally ever kicked any-
one in the chest without emotion? In
our current state of skepticism, it may
be that any kind of omniscience feels
like condescension, and for Adam—
or Lerner—to inhabit the minds of
ordinary young townsfolk would have
been to dabble in Kansas kitsch. But to
leave the Topekans out of The Topeka
School means that the city, as a distinc-
tive place rather than a multi valent
symbol or private proving ground, ef-
fectively drops out of the book, and the
better part of the social drops out of the
social novel.
At the end of the book, the adult
Adam has arrived at the same point
that many of his fellow citizens have, by
thousands of different paths through
different states and histories: at a fed-
eral office building, with his wife and
young daughter, chanting in protest
against the family separation policy at
the southern border. “It embarrassed
me, it always had,” Adam says of hear-
ing his own voice repeating simple
phrases and slogans in chorus, “but I
forced myself to participate, to be part
of a tiny public speaking.” He is one of
many, his linguistic virtuosity beside
the point. The political gesture is also
a literary one: the novelist depicts his
own humbling. To be part of a public
speaking may be discomfiting, but it’s
not nearly as treacherous as writing
novels for, and about, the public that’s
reading. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.—Galili Shahar, Haaretz
“A splendid text, learned and diligent, but not
without resourcefulness of language. It’s a scholarly
work that is written like a melancholic novella.”
- CELEBRATING 20 YEARS
WRITING ON THE RUN
CLASSICS ABOUT TRAVEL AND PLACE
Thursday, February 6, 2020 • 6:00 –7:30pm
Arthur L. Carter Journalism Center • NYU
20 Cooper Square, 7th Floor, New York
Visit http://www.nyihumanities.org to RSVP for this free event.Yasmine El Rashidi
on Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth HardwickSuketu Mehta
on Jejuri by Arun KolatkarDaniel Mendelsohn
on Patrick Leigh FermorEmily Raboteau
on An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel KpomassieModerated by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
THE SECOND IN A SERIES: CLASSICS OLD AND NEWSponsored by New York Review Books, the New York Institute for the Humanities at
NYU, and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Program in Literary Reportage