Parents experience their children’s suffering intensely, even when they have no idea what’s causing it. cta_1_check_327130 = true; Coached by Peter Evanson, a former national debate champion who is now a rising Republican political consultant, Adam is encouraged to play to the judges’ right-wing attitudes, deploy “quick swerves into the folksy,” and, when on the ropes, resort to a style of verbal overkill known as “the spread.” “Spreading” one’s opponent means “to make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule being among serious debaters that a ‘dropped argument,’ no matter its quality, its content, is conceded.” It’s a kind of rhetorical carpet-bombing. if( inline_cta_font_color_327130 !='' ){ The beautiful recollections of childhood in, ...thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary ... funny, and at times, painfully acute. When Adam brings the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, there are disastrous consequences. Closely related to The Topeka School’s interrogation of masculinity is its treatment of language. The chapters narrated by Gordon’s mother, Jane, a famous feminist author, much like Lerner’s real mother, are a revelation. In this way, “The Topeka School” feels like a sketch of what it was like to be a white man in middle America approaching the 21st century. The book finds Lerner at a crossroads, tempted by the conventions of the novel even as he continues to insist on the priority of the poetic. Orange County under siege by wildfires; 2 firefighters gravely burned. if( jQuery("#ad-halfpage-327130-0").is(":empty") ){call_ad_new('halfpage','tn_article','ad-halfpage-327130-0','rectangle_1',{"tn_author":"'evan-k'","tn_articleid":327130,"tn_ptype":"article","tn_keyword":"false","tn_subject":"'fiction', 'poetry'","tn_slp":""});} Adam Gordon is a senior and renowned debater at Topeka High School, class of ’97, where 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. var magazine_button_url_327130 = ''; Poor and mentally impaired, Darren is the novel’s id — an “off” kid who dropped out of high school but hangs around, desperate for approval from jocks … Adam attending school in New York also stands for a sort of familial return to the metropolitan area. Bowen’s theory states that “families so profoundly affect their members’ thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if people are living under the same ‘emotional skin.’” Children can’t help taking on their parents’ stresses. }else{ Endorsement: The Times endorses Hoffman, Anderson, Henderson and Han for LACCD. Rather than repeating with an error that marks one’s difference, as in the game with “The Purple Cow,” the people’s mic asks him to participate in a public, to create that public by effacing his individuality—to be a body in a bigger body. var cta_1_check_327130 = false; The story tells itself. if( is_user_logged_in != null ){ In The Topeka School we learn that Adam’s father, Jonathan, and his mother, Jane, are Jewish therapists who moved from New York to Kansas to work at the Foundation, a progressive psychiatric clinic. We might also expect a book set among psychoanalysts to have something to say about free association, and the narrative of The Topeka School does occasionally devolve into association or list making. Marlon James chats during the Festival of Books about his novel, “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” winner of The Times’ 2019 Ray Bradbury Prize. In 10:04 the narrator assures his poet friends that he won’t write fiction anymore. “The Topeka School” was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2019. This scene works to not only vilify teenage American boys, but to contrast Taipei with the primary setting of the book, Topeka, Kansas. inline_cta_font_color_327130 = '#000000'; He’s a Caliban who never learned how to curse. var inline_cta_url_327130 = ''; There are similar leitmotifs in Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, but the device operates differently here. But there’s hope. var magazine_text_327130 = ''; In one key scene, while he was doing some hurricane shopping at a ransacked Whole Foods, he picked up a red plastic container of instant coffee and glimpsed its whole journey, from the “Andean slopes” to Union Square. On the one hand it insists that the book is related to the authorial life indicated in the margins, and on the other hand it renders that relationship irrelevant. Perhaps the point is simple—Darren is not a poet. . View our current issue Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 304 pages, $27. Which is only to say what the poet in Lerner may not want to admit but The Topeka School, almost despite itself, confirms: I think he’s a novelist. Ad Policy 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. A UCLA librarian on why you’ll want to read about them. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. As the child of transplanted coastal liberals—a “red-diaper kid from a red state”—Adam is inoculated against Evanson’s right-wing ideology, but even if he “was rarely if ever swayed by a position…he was with every passing hour absorbing an interpersonal style it would take him decades fully to unlearn.” (And this style, we’re given to understand, is not unrelated to the wider culture of misogyny in Topeka and America at large. inline_cta_bg_color_327130 = '#ffcf0d'; (He is also the poetry editor of this magazine.) Current Issue Poetry represents possibility, utopia, the virtual; prose stands for the existent, the immanent, the actual. if( magazine_button_text_327130 !='' ){ The book is structured around a series of repeated phrases that constantly send the reader back to hunt for cross-references, somewhat impeding the narrative’s momentum. inline_cta_text_327130 = '

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'; inline_cta_2_url_327130 = 'https://ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/NAT/app/live/subscriptions?org=NAT&publ=NA&key_code=68F1CGS&type=S'; “What Darren could not make them understand was that he would never have thrown it except he always had. jQuery("#magazine_button_327130 a input").css("background",magazine_button_bg_color_327130); inline_cta_2_font_color_327130 = '#ffffff'; Where some writers revel in the messiness of the “reality” of autofiction, Lerner’s books are coherent and unified, variations on a theme. var inline_cta_bg_color_327130 = ''; In each house she or someone like her was in her bed, sleeping or pretending to sleep; legal guardians were farther down the hall, large men snoring; the faces and poses in the family photographs on the mantel might change, but would all belong to the same grammar of faces and poses; the elements of the painted scenes might vary, but not the level of familiarity and flatness; if you opened any of the giant stainless steel refrigerators or surveyed the faux-marble islands, you would encounter matching, modular products in slightly different configurations. Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking. She’s not a victim; she’s an empowered observer using her experience to gain more wisdom. Is anything more embarrassing than writing a novel? At several crucial moments he jams the fast-forward button, escaping the 1990s and returning us to our regularly scheduled dystopia of pussy grabbing, mass shootings, and family separations. By signing up to receive emails, you agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation's journalism. }. inline_cta_font_color_327130 = '#000000'; “If I was a poet,” muses Adam Gordon, the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station, “I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.” For Adam, “poet” is more of an identity category, an orientation toward capitalist society, than it is a profession or practice. Need to create a login? College—presumably where Adam picked up his taste for cultural theory and his ability to analyze an old photograph—is absent except as the site of lovesick breakdown, social faux pas, and a manic phone call home. “Corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time,” he writes, in television commercials for prescription drugs and “the list of rules and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of promotions on the radio.” The spread is yet another form of verbal spell, a use of language not to communicate but to dominate: These types of disclosure were designed to conceal; they exposed you to information that, should you challenge the institution in question, would be treated like a “dropped argument” in a fast round of debate—you have already conceded the validity of the point by failing to address it when it was presented. Did Donald Trump get elected by people who were confused about what he really thought? Though Adam recedes, he never disappears into the background of The Topeka School. On its own terms, Lerner’s neo-Romantic theory of poetry as pure potential is a bit thin and self-serving; it seems designed to assuage poets’ sense of obsolescence rather than make a real claim for their art’s significance. By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. At the beginning of the novel, Adam enters what he thinks is his girlfriend Amber’s lakeside house, only to find that he has trespassed accidentally into an almost identical prefab unit: Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house, with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once; the sublime of identical layouts. “Can you just put it in the trash? Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER (What’s the matter with Kansas?) This week’s lineup in the virtual Festival of Books 2020 features conversations with Natalie Portman, Kevin Kwan, Marlon James and Maria Hinojosa. Their confusion is related to aesthetic reproduction—what happens when you try to imitate a performance from a video, or watch a film that you haven’t seen in a long time. Get the latest news and notes from our community Book Club. In Atocha, “poetic possibility” was doomed to failure in the form of concrete poems, but served as an unattainable horizon toward which everything moved. Endorsements. This form of ritualistic public chanting activates the embarrassment of belonging to a group, and the awfulness of hearing one’s own voice in catechism with others.