The Atlantic - October 2019

42 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by MELINDA JOSIE

novel, Adam looks for her frantically, stumbling

through a community of lake houses so uncannily

identical that he accidentally lets himself into the

wrong home, thinking it’s Amber’s. He’s fright-

ened, and when he eventually finds her, he’s furi-

ous. She doesn’t apologize for scaring him. Instead,

she recounts a story about how her stepfather used

to talk so endlessly at dinner that she once just

slipped under the table and crawled off into the

kitchen, where her mother was doing dishes. The

two women looked at each other and then stood

together in the doorway, watching him talking with

vigor to an empty room. It’s funny, but the humor

vanishes when Amber describes what happened

when her stepfather turned around:

He looks at my chair then back at us and now my

mom and I start really cracking up. Then he gets

this fucked-up smile that’s pure rage. Like how

dare you cunts laugh at me. But I give him the

stepdaughter smile back and hold it, hold it. We

basically have a staring contest and my mom’s

laughter gets all nervous until finally his face

relaxes and it’s all a big joke.

Y

O U N G A D A M D O E S N ’ T understand
why she’s telling him this story, but
Lerner makes the connection explicit.
Though Adam is sensitive and well intentioned,
he exists on a spectrum of men who use language
not to communicate or connect, but to indulge in
ecstatic solip sism, or to effectively erase the per-
son they’re addres sing. When they are challenged,
they explode. Throughout the novel, the women
who love them gently try to persuade them to slow
down, make sense, and shut up, with little lasting
effect. Adam’s mother, Jane, receives phone calls
from male anti-fans, angry about some feminist
element in her books. They empty streams of abuse
and death threats into the phone until she interrupts
them in an innocent tone to say the connection is
bad; could they please speak up? Can they say that
again, but louder? She prods “the Men” until they’re
shouting or, unwilling to shout, forced to hang up. It
works for the moment, but then more men call. The
male vitriol seems inexorable.
In The Topeka School, women are neither
geniuses of language nor abusers of it in the man-
ner of men. They are often better, more profound
communicators (with her books, Jane reaches
more people than any other character does), but
they exist here as men’s linguistic and emotional
foils. The working class, too, seems mostly tan-
gential: The anger of midwestern, edu cated,
middle- class men and their blue-collar counter-
parts blurs together, even if it’s expressed in dif-
ferent vocab ularies. Race goes largely unexplored,
other than that all of these Kansan teenagers like
to rap and make gang signs, believing that they’re

expressing their alienation in a way that is some-

how powerful and dangerous. Teenage Adam

thinks that the era of white men’s dominance is

passing, but the “genealogy” he writes—and the

world he lives in—as an adult indicates that this

hasn’t happened.

Lerner seems interested in reiterating via the

details of his own biography the now-evident poli-

tical reality that these alienated men are powerful

and dangerous precisely when they feel they are

not. Even in Adam—a relatively sensitive poet, who

nominally embraces feminism and prides himself

on being the only boy he knows who studiously per-

forms oral sex on his girlfriend—we see threatened

white masculinity deploying whatever language is at

its disposal to reclaim the ascendancy it believes is

its birthright. The words may be stolen from Tupac

or funneled through poetry, “spread” in extempo-

raneous argument, shouted in a blind rage, or com-

pletely nonsensical. Even when babbling (Adam’s

and Jonathan’s mode during panic attacks or flights

of fancy) or intentionally dissembling (Evanson’s

debate specialty), the men dominate the spaces they

occupy. It seems sort of ridiculous until you remem-

ber the specter haunting this book, an extempora-

neous wonder whose incoherent babbling serves

to dissemble, deceive, distract. In America, Lerner

reminds us, you can sound like an idiot all you want,

but if you master the spread, you rule.

Jordan Kisner is a writer in New York City.

BOOKS

BLUEBIRD

The house was strange, even for a summer house,

cold somehow, the wraparound screened porch

almost cut off by the trees, though the trees, off

and on, would come alive with bluebirds, birds

so tame, they would follow on the mountain path

down to the small home lake, chur-wi, tru-ly,

chur-wi, tru-ly, over and over, in bird-English.

Had I ever seen a bluebird so bright a blue?—

a blue easily confused with happiness. I didn’t

even know a bluebird was a thrush. I knew

and loved you, that was enough. These blues,

as you called them, were yours: They seemed

to fly in and out of your hands. The lake was one

of those mirrorlike lakes. And the house was yours.

— Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly (1939–

2019) was the author of

numerous books of poetry

and prose, including

Against Sunset (2016)

and Post humous Keats:

A Personal Biography

(2008). His post humous

collection, Middle

Distance, will be

published next year.