The Topeka School

Description

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. A renowned debater and orator, an aspiring poet, and - although it requires a lot of posturing and weight lifting - one of the cool kids, he's also one of the seniors who brings the loner Darren Eberheart into the social scene, with disastrous effects. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is a riveting story about the challenges of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a startling prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the tyranny of trolls and the new right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path and No Art as well as the essay The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight an deep psychological sensitivity... To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here -- Sally Rooney A great novel, one summoned by the desperate times in which it was written. Lerner has [...] created a work of extraordinary intelligence and subtlety, of lasting importance * Observer * Ben Lerner has redefined what it means for a writer to inhabit an American present by showing how a family reckons with its past. Here the personal and political are masterfully interwoven. The Topeka School is brave, furious, and finally a work of love -- Ocean Vuong The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired -- Maggie Nelson In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences. What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet -- Claudia Rankine, author of * Citizen: An American Lyric * Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new...He is one of my favourite living writers -- Rachel Kushner Ben Lerner is a masterful writer who destabilizes the very notion of what a novel can achieve by making it new at every turn. The Topeka School is not only a fiction for our times, but for the ages: insightful, humane, politically astute, and true -- Hilton Als, author * White Girls * The Topeka School weaves a masterful narrative...It's rare to find a book that is simultaneously searing in its social critique and so lush in its prose that it verges on poetry * Paris Review * I really like his work, it's very striking and unusual -- Emily St John Mandel Attentive to confused, buried or ugly emotions, the weight of societal burdens on the individual, and always searching for the vulnerability that hides in the shadow of violence, The Topeka School ultimately felt hopeful to me in its depiction of thoughtful caregiving -- Books of the Year * New Statesman *