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The Topeka School Spiral-Bound | 2020-09-29
Ben Lerner
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The Topeka School
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From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart--who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient--into the social scene, to disastrous effect.
Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 304 pages
ISBN-10: 1250758009
Item Weight: 0.6 lbs
Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
Praise for The Topeka School
"The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight, and deep psychological sensitivity. At every turn, its beautifully realized characters are shaped, even in the privacy of their inner lives, by the pressures of history and culture--this is a book not only about how things really feel, but what things really mean. To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here."
--Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
"Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new . . . He is one of my favorite living writers."
--Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
"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 of White Girls
"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, author of The Argonauts
"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 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, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Booksellers Praise The Topeka School
"Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 set the stage for The Topeka School, a bracing look at a family coming to terms with itself in Kansas. There are brilliant narrative steps back as well as forward, giving this late twentieth century setting even more resonance. A readerly joy."
--Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
"The Topeka School is more than an exquisitely written novel and a chronicle of one young poet's Midwestern adolescence, although it certainly is that. But it's also an inquiry into the under-examined aspects of white manhood: its fictions and anxieties, its rituals of violence."
--Theo Henderson, Third Place Books, Seattle, WA
"Rich, ambitious, and full of momentum."
--Lillian Fishman, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
"Devastating emotional honesty . . . One of the most powerful, resonant inquiries into what, in dangerous and disjointed times, might possibly constitute a good life."
--John Ganiard, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI
"This is a marvelously crafted story about colliding fates, avoiding our fates, and what it means if we can't help but live up to them. The Topeka School is as intellectually nimble as it is compassionate . . . A dazzling show of Ben Lerner's impressive ability to uncover the soft interiors behind the stolid facades of the people, and the types of people, we think we know."
--Colleen Callery, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY
"Ben Lerner's The Topeka School reinvents the suburban coming-of-age novel for the Trump era . . . A complex meditation on language, meaning, and the very act of creation."
--Danny Caine, Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, KS
"The Topeka School is one of those amazing novels that captures a specific place and period, even as it reveals transcendent truths about the human condition. I cannot stop thinking about all the humanity infused in each character. Not every novelist can be brainy and accessible, but in his new book, Ben Lerner embodies both qualities."
--Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books, Wichita, KS
"What does it mean to live after the so-called end of history? The Topeka School, Ben Lerner's stunning new novel, the latest entry in his constellation of autofictions, is, in some ways, a positing of this very question. This story of a boy growing up in middle America is a tragic interrogation of the chaos and violence of our world, a deft exploration of the ethics of the novel in these times of ecosocial disaster, a lacerating critique of that empire that makes us this way; it is, in short, a marvel. Moving in its intelligence, its generosity, its openness, this is Lerner doing what he does best, making the familiar not only strange, but also, and perhaps more importantly, historical and political."
--Sam Wooley, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
"The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight, and deep psychological sensitivity. At every turn, its beautifully realized characters are shaped, even in the privacy of their inner lives, by the pressures of history and culture--this is a book not only about how things really feel, but what things really mean. To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here."
--Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
"Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new . . . He is one of my favorite living writers."
--Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
"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 of White Girls
"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, author of The Argonauts
"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 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, author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Booksellers Praise The Topeka School
"Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 set the stage for The Topeka School, a bracing look at a family coming to terms with itself in Kansas. There are brilliant narrative steps back as well as forward, giving this late twentieth century setting even more resonance. A readerly joy."
--Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
"The Topeka School is more than an exquisitely written novel and a chronicle of one young poet's Midwestern adolescence, although it certainly is that. But it's also an inquiry into the under-examined aspects of white manhood: its fictions and anxieties, its rituals of violence."
--Theo Henderson, Third Place Books, Seattle, WA
"Rich, ambitious, and full of momentum."
--Lillian Fishman, Greenlight Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
"Devastating emotional honesty . . . One of the most powerful, resonant inquiries into what, in dangerous and disjointed times, might possibly constitute a good life."
--John Ganiard, Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor, MI
"This is a marvelously crafted story about colliding fates, avoiding our fates, and what it means if we can't help but live up to them. The Topeka School is as intellectually nimble as it is compassionate . . . A dazzling show of Ben Lerner's impressive ability to uncover the soft interiors behind the stolid facades of the people, and the types of people, we think we know."
--Colleen Callery, Books Are Magic, Brooklyn, NY
"Ben Lerner's The Topeka School reinvents the suburban coming-of-age novel for the Trump era . . . A complex meditation on language, meaning, and the very act of creation."
--Danny Caine, Raven Bookstore, Lawrence, KS
"The Topeka School is one of those amazing novels that captures a specific place and period, even as it reveals transcendent truths about the human condition. I cannot stop thinking about all the humanity infused in each character. Not every novelist can be brainy and accessible, but in his new book, Ben Lerner embodies both qualities."
--Sarah Bagby, Watermark Books, Wichita, KS
"What does it mean to live after the so-called end of history? The Topeka School, Ben Lerner's stunning new novel, the latest entry in his constellation of autofictions, is, in some ways, a positing of this very question. This story of a boy growing up in middle America is a tragic interrogation of the chaos and violence of our world, a deft exploration of the ethics of the novel in these times of ecosocial disaster, a lacerating critique of that empire that makes us this way; it is, in short, a marvel. Moving in its intelligence, its generosity, its openness, this is Lerner doing what he does best, making the familiar not only strange, but also, and perhaps more importantly, historical and political."
--Sam Wooley, Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
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, and of a book-length essay, The Hatred of Poetry. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.