My Kansas pride can be many things, but it is always cringeworthy. When I’ve traipsed around New York bars celebrating KU basketball victories, or too-excitedly played the name game with someone-who-knows-someone from Kansas, I can sense the embarrassed twitch of my east coast friends, putting up with the endearing Midwestness of it all.
Of course, the same tends to be true of the darker sides of Topeka; Brown v Board, the Phelps family.
And so it is with Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School. The day it came out, I bragged to the bookstore cashier in Greenpoint that I was also a former Topeka High School debater -- just like Ben Lerner! and the protagonist! -- and practically shouted “Happy reading!” to the guy with the book in line behind me.
What I expected was a novelization of Lerner’s childhood in Topeka -- and by extension, mine (“It’s like F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a book about my life,” I explained to a friend). What I got was much different, and deeper, and darker: a poet interrogating his identity as a privileged white male in 2019, with Topeka as his backdrop.
The most important context to hold while reading Lerner’s work is that he is a poet first, novelist second. In past interviews, Lerner has explained that he uses auto-fiction in his novels out of necessity: his own life tends to be the easiest access point for storytelling. At times, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 read like thinly-veiled memoirs. But this is only because Lerner uses his protagonists and plotlines as vehicles to uncover larger ideas about art and language.
The same is true in The Topeka School, which examines the breakdown of language in recent years. At different points throughout the book, we witness characters lose their ability to communicate. After performing a battery of tests on troubled male youths, Jonathan, a psychologist at the Institute, notices a curious phenomenon in which, “under conditions of information overload, the speech mechanisms collapse.” His wife, Jane (also an Institute psychologist) has a similar experience recalling an unearthed memory of childhood trauma:
My speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like.
Rather than fall victim to this breakdown, Jonathan’s and Jane’s brilliant son Adam benefits from it. A star high-school debater, he deploys a tactic called the “spread”: pummeling opponents under a mountain of evidence and counterpoints -- all spoken at high-speed so as to be unintelligible and, as such, irrefutable. However, the spread is just one tool in a bag of rhetorical tricks: he wins arguments with his parents on technicalities, he uses impressive rhymes to win freestyle rap battles at parties, and he spits vitriol at the Phelps family as they protest his mother’s book reading.
But Adam learns how to channel his voice through his mentor -- and the antagonist of the book -- a former two-time national speech champion named Evanson. Through Evanson, Adam becomes more successful as Evanson teaches him to become less truthful. Evanson lays out this strategy in gory detail:
You’re an hour or two outside Pittsburgh, and while you need to be intelligent, you need to be winning hearts as much as minds. What you have in your favor is Kansas. You have Midland American English. I want quick swerves into the folksy. “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” That kind of thing. I want you saying, right after some hyper-eloquent riff about Yeltsin breaking a promise, “Now, in Kansas, we call that a lie.” After you go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on that.” I don’t care if they’re not real sayings, just deliver them like they’re tried-and-true.
… Oh, and I want you citing the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I didn’t ask if you have it in your files, I said I want you citing it. For every Le Monde, I want the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Just use “as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer” for something that probably was. The Mexican economy has enjoyed strong growth, as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Roman Herzog is less influential than Helmut Kohl, as reported in, etc. You can be too general to be disprovable.
Evanson is modeled after David Kensinger, a real Topeka High academic legend who went on to become Sam Brownback’s chief architect during Brownback’s disastrous term as the governor of Kansas. In this way, and with increasingly less subtlety, The Topeka School draws a direct line between the white male rage and its creepy evolution into Tea Party politics that dominated in the 2010s. Lerner draws this line with black-sharpie clarity in the novel’s climactic scene at a Topeka party, when this rage results in true violence.
As a Topekan, what remains truly impressive about this book is how true it reads to the experience. Every detail rings true.
But they also highlight the details make the parts of the Gordons’ family life unsettling for me and, at times, pornographic.
What I also see as true is that Lerner-as-Gordon the high schooler is, in fact, an arrogant dick. But this clear profile gives me a belief that this is an author who is doing the hard work of examining his own life, and his own influences, before looking outward.
In doing so Lerner’s novel asks us: How do we speak when our most dominant voice -- the angry white male -- is working against us? And Lerner, as part of that voice, turns inward to ask: how do I, the angry white male, change my voice and still communicate the truth?
Lerner, as Gordon, clearly finds some catharsis in poetry, which reinvigorates language and meaning. However, the final scene offers Lerner’s thoughts as he storms City Hall with concerned parents and then participates in mic-drop chants: as a white male, his best choice is simply to shut up, listen, and, for the first time, let others speak.