Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

 

This Memoir disguised as a novel – more than a Roman a Clef – a memoir that uses the novel form to clarify that it is subjective history, but one that retains history, and slightly shifts it – is weird to read as someone who has lived in and among many of the people in the book and has shared a culture – the culture of the Foundation – the Menninger Clinic – that is at the heart of this book.  And as much as I initially read this book with prurient interest – and as much as it tells truths about the people and places that author and I have in common, the center of the book is about language.

 

This book is divided into chapters that are sandwiched in between updates about the internal world of a minor character in the main story – a boy, Darren, who is the antithesis of the hero Adam.  Darren’s family are Topeka natives, unlike Adam’s family – and the families of the rest of the Foundation kids.  The distinction is a little like a college town where the townies are indigenous and the students and faculty belong to a different group.  But Darren belongs to neither group.  He has difficulties – with language and thought – that Adam indicates could be helped by the Foundation – by his father in particular – if Darren’s parents had the means or the insurance, but they don’t.  So Darren’s story is both integral and marginal to the story as a whole.

 

The main story is about Adam (clearly a version of Ben), his family, and about his coming of age.  It is a subtly brutal story – brutal in an odd way that is the mirror of the brutality in the novel by Ben’s student, Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re BrieflyGorgeous, in that the instrument of the brutality in this story is the hero himself.  Or rather both of them.  Darren is also brutal in the moment that hangs in the air throughout the story, but we understand the sources of Darren’s brutality – he, like Ocean’s alter ego, is abused by society and he reacts to that (which Ocean’s hero does not – Ocean’s hero is somehow able to understand and metabolize the brutality that is visited upon him).  Neither Darren nor Adam can contain their anger – both harm those around them, including women whom they admire and denigrate.

 

The main story is told through different lenses.  Four of the chapters are told from the perspective of Adam, though they are written in the third person.  Two of the chapters are told from the perspective of Jonathan, Adam’s father.  Interestingly, these are told in the first person.  And they are startling on target.  I happen to know Ben’s father.  The reluctant first wife and I saw him in marital therapy when I was working at the “Foundation”.  But it is not knowing him as a therapist and a person that this rings true, but from my identification with Jonathan as the father of Adam – and my fathering of my own son – who could not be more different in some ways than Adam.  This raises a question.  Is Ben more comfortable inhabiting the mind of his father than his own mind?  Does he now identify with his father more than he does with the person – or this version of the person – that he once was?  Or does he need to find some distance from himself in order to be able to identify with himself and to help us identify with him?

 

Finally, two chapters are told from the perspective of Adam’s mother.  Adam’s mother speaks for herself to Adam – or Ben.  He, Adam, goes home as an adult to get background information and Adam’s mother tells him what he wants to know, knowing that what she tells him will go in his book.  Adam’s mother – a version of Harriet Goldhor Lerner, the author who was famous for writing the Dance of Anger and then a series of additional self-help books with Dance in the title, is no stranger to the effects of having a public life.  In the novel, she talks about handling the calls of men who were angry about her book, and the sneers of men in the grocery store who were mad about the ways her books empowered their wives – or ex-wives.  Ben, through Adam, gives Harriet, in the character of Jane, the ability to tell her own story – and to clarify that she is continuing to knowingly live a very public life.

 

Language is at the heart of this book.  Ben is an accomplished poet and this is his third novel.  He has written for the New Yorker and, though he couldn’t have known this would happen when he was writing the book, this book was the runner-up for the Pullitzer Prize.  He knows how to put words down on paper.  Adam, his alter ego, becomes (spoiler alert) the National Champion in Extemporaneous Speaking.  He wields words as a debater, as an extemporaneous speaker, and in his mind as the sharpest of weapons.  He brutally demonstrates, near the end of the book, how Amber, the attractive, popular girl whom he chooses to date over his debate partner – is of no real long term interest because of the paucity of her language.  But, unlike Ocean, this is not done with charity, but with malice.  It is almost shockingly hostile – more so because his victim doesn’t know – perhaps until she reads this novel – how summarily she has been dismissed.

 

But language, for both Adam and Darren, is at best a treacherous means to an end.  Darren is all but mute because the thoughts that he has can’t be represented in language – they are too weird – he is too weird – to talk to others in anything like consensual English.  Adam is deathly afraid that his words will leave him.  He fears that he will get on stage and be unable to be articulate.  Back to that spoiler alert – I could find no record of Ben Lerner having won a National Extemporaneous speech contest, though there was a record of a boy from Topeka winning it twice – in the era when the mentor that Adam has would have won it.  Did Ben invent a different ending for himself?  One in which, unlike in real life, when his mother withheld valium from him at Nationals, she actually gave it to him and this helped him manage his fears so that he, as Adam, won?  Is Ben angry enough at Harriet over this to expose her in this book in the ways that he does?

 

But I think language unites Adam and Darren on a much deeper level.  I think that language fails both of them.  The book opens with Adam talking to Amber on a rowboat while they are on a lake at night.  Unbeknownst to Adam, Amber slips overboard and swims off while he prattles on, telling the moon and the dragonflies the deep and important ideas that he wants to convey.  This is followed by an eery, uncanny wander through a stranger’s home, thinking it is Amber’s.  Adam is lost.  His words, as much as he has control over them, do not convey what he is feeling.  They do not connect him to others, but they divide him from them.  Adam, like Ocean’s Little Dog, and his own Mother and Father, has insights onto other’s psyches.  But unlike Little Dog, Adam uses those insights to feel disdain towards those he has come to know – just as Darren does.  Adam hates where Little Dog loves.  Adam has learned from the townies how to use his elbows rather than his fists to land blows that are more powerful – that do more damage – and that are surprising because they come from closer in.

 

Ben ends this book rather abruptly and, I think, cutely.  It is heralded as a book that is about the divide that language has created in the country in the age of Trump and his cronies.  The MAGA days.  And Ben has framed this book so that it can be understood in this way.  That we have left behind reason – that the spread of point counterpoint in a debate gave way, in the Reagan – Carter debate, to taking the moral high ground – Reagan winning by saying, “There you go again…” as Carter would use a fact to demonstrate what he meant.  And, of course, the irony is delicious.  Who is the more moral ex-President? 

 

But I think this book is much more personal than universal.  Not just because I have had a little access to some of the principle characters and to the culture that is being examined here; the culture of the “Foundation”.  The culture of a community of people deeply and at times dangerously involved in each other’s lives and the lives of their patients.  A culture of people perceived as having a magic elixir that could impart to the chosen healing – something that has always been associated, in our culture, with miracles.  But I think it is also the case that these miracles are never quite enough – especially for those from whom they feel withheld.  I suppose that Darren ends up being an odd fun house mirror for Adam.  Like Darren, Adam felt shut out from something deep and mysterious – something like love.  Something like the communication that language promised.  What he saw around him felt to him, I think, tawdry and disappointing.  Cheap, like the mass produced tins that his mother was led to believe were unique works of art.  He longed for Duccio’s Madonna and Child – a personal devotional that is scarred by the heat of candles that are a measure of the love that the viewer feels for the Mother and Infant that are depicted there.

 

This, then, is a book about the anger that white men feel.  An anger that is surprising to those who, from the outside, say, “What have you got to be angry about?”  As if power were a reasonable substitute for love.  As if being in charge were the same thing as being loved.  And as if our language, with all of its fine gradations, would allow us to articulate this need in such a way that it could be met without our having to become vulnerable.  We fear, from the inside of our safe space, that vulnerability and, so, may end up being locked in a tower or, as our President is this week, cowering in a bunker…

  For the accompanying post on Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, link here.

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