“They are told constantly, the culture tells them, although ‘culture’ is hardly the word […] that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end.”
Adam Gordon is back.
Ben Lerner’s alter-ego, first introduced with his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011)—the highly-medicated narrative of a twenty-something poet (and pathological liar) on a prestigious literary fellowship in Madrid—is now, like Lerner, on the other side of forty, teaching writing in Brooklyn, and raising kids in a “post-truth” America.
The Topeka School (FSG, 2019), Lerner’s third novel, following critics’ favorite 10:04 (Picador, 2014), tells the story of “before”: before Adam left Kansas in the dust for the East Coast (“where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony”); before the relocation to Texas of the “Foundation” where his mother, a famous feminist psychologist (like Lerner’s), and father, a therapist specialized in treating “lost boys,” worked; before the #MeToo movement and the popular diagnosis of a “crisis of masculinity.”
And then it loops back—leaps over the twenty-plus years in between—and suggests what might have led to Adam, in the present day, getting into a playground altercation with a “bad father,” accusing him of propagating a culture in which men boast of “grabbing pussy,” knocking his phone to the ground, and—in the novel’s final sequence—stiff-arming past a security guard to occupy an ICE detention facility with his family.
So, what did lead to all of this?
Working at the Foundation (based on the real-life Menninger Foundation, famous for its development of group “milieu” therapy) during the 90s “economic boom,” after Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed “the end of history,” Adam’s father, Jonathan, observes that one of his senior colleagues, Klaus, a Holocaust survivor and one-time correspondent of Einstein, Jung, and Anna Freud:
could not take [his “lost boys”]—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout?
And then, on the other hand, Klaus took them very seriously indeed; they are told constantly, the culture tells them, although “culture” is hardly the word, […] that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end.
One of Jonathan’s “lost boys” is Darren Eberheart, a classmate of Adam’s at Topeka High School, who will, before their graduation, commit a heinous act of violence, leaving a female classmate literally speechless, and who, in 2017 or 2018 (Cardi B is playing constantly on the radio), will or will not participate in an imagined or real Westboro Baptist Church protest outside of one of Adam’s poetry readings in Kansas, “heavier than the last time you saw him, bearded, almost certainly armed, […] wearing the red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence.”
Lerner leaves this point—whether the “lost boy” Darren has grown up to become a gun-toting, homophobic fundamentalist who supports an administration that “[tears] children from their mothers” and “[puts] kids in cages”—purposely unclear, noting how his observer Adam was under the influence of a tranquilizer at the time, how he experienced a drug-enhanced “flickering” between his poetry reading and an earlier event at the same location, when his mother was protested by the Westboro Baptist Church, even going so far as to directly address his readers: “What is happening in this moment? What are the characters thinking and feeling? Tell me what led up to this scene.”
What is clear is that Darren is one of the “man-children”:
[Darren] represented […] the bad surplus. The man-child, descendant of the jester and village idiot and John Clare, the poet roaming the countryside after enclosure. The persistence of the mind of childhood—its plenitude and purposelessness—into the sexually mature body, which has succumbed to historical time […] The man-child represented a farcical form of freedom.
With this description—”the man-child, descendant of the jester and village idiot and John Clare, the poet”—Lerner characterizes the central conflict of The Topeka School; the near-mute Darren might represent the “jester and village idiot,” but it is Adam—one of the classmates who mockingly takes Darren under his wing, invites him to high school parties where he drinks Olde English and prides himself for his freestyling (“the most shameful of all the poses, the clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity”)—who represents “John Clare, the poet.”
Indeed, the (same?) Adam Gordon who will later spend a year getting high and not writing poetry in Madrid—lying to women that his mother has just died, so that they will feel sorry for him—already has aspirations of becoming a poet, and his motivations are never far from the page:
He hoped she liked the poetry he made out of it, how he wanted her to see what he saw, and to imagine seeing with or as her; the world’s subtlest fireworks announcing the problem of other minds. Soon they were kissing again and he didn’t know if they would fuck.
Later:
He wanted to be a poet because poems were spells, were shaped sound unmaking and remaking sense that inflicted and repelled violence and made you renowned, or renowned for being erased, and could have other effects on bodies: put them to sleep or wake them, cause tears or other forms of lubrication, swelling, the raising of small hairs.
“Poetry” here is decidedly manipulative—predatory, even. And when Adam is not attempting to seduce young women with verse, or humiliate other man-children with battle-raps (portrayed as contests, of sorts, for mating “rights”), he competes as a high school national debate champion, careless with the facts (“Adam has no idea if what he’s said is true”) and fiercely combative (“the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation”).
Adam practices “the spread”—the tactic of overloading an opponent with disparate and unanswerable arguments as quickly as possible, to “spread” them thin—by “trying to read with a pen in [his] mouth”—the same technique he employs elsewhere to practice cunnilingus (I’ll spare you the details).
Lerner has written about his real-life experience as a high school national debate champion before, in a 2012 “memoir” piece for Harper’s, titled, “Contest of Words.” Entire sentences have made their way (word-for-word) from that personal essay into The Topeka School. Some observations, made four years before the 2016 presidential election, today seem almost too obvious to point out (e.g., “the fearful symmetry between […] high school debate and what passes for national political discourse”).
Lerner, the first poetry editor at Harper’s, also noted at the time how “the Foxnewsification of [public discourse] outpaced parody and a Bush or Rumsfeld press conference dispensed with logic and linearity more thoroughly than did experimental poetry”:
When I read the Language poets, whose long-form prose poetry used disjunction and non sequitur to subvert the dominant representational orders of the day, or heard them read their poetry aloud, I was reminded of how […] debaters would often cover syllogistic failures with fluency or speed; transcribed, such basically insane speeches could be mistaken for certain experimental poems.
Indeed, you can find online a handful of “found” poetry collections interpolating the speeches of Donald Rumsfeld and Trump. Not all of them appear to be parodies.
What is striking about Lerner’s third novel is the way it implicates itself, its forms—literature, prose, poetry—in the collapse of public discourse, and the proliferation of “man-children.” Even when “grown-up,” stroller-pushing Adam tries at the playground to stand up for his daughters against the “bad father” (who refuses to reprimand his toddler son for not sharing the slide), he reverts to his disavowed debating tactics, and there is something parodic, farcical about his attempt to be an “ally”:
Instinctually, I went for an element of discursive surprise: I’ve been trying to enlist your help, I said, leading with a Foundation vocabulary, but delivering it as though I were talking shit; I’ve been asking for your help in making the playground a safe space for my daughters; I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it’s about pussy grabbing; it’s about my fears regarding the world into which I’ve brought them.
When the other father tells him to “fuck off,” Adam resorts to physical violence, knocking the man’s phone to the ground—”both of us bad fathers now”—and returns to his daughters empty-handed: “Come on, I said to my girls, and when Luna said, no, I snapped at her: Now, I hissed; come right now or we’re going straight home; I’m the father; I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.”
Equally farcical (though tragically so—“first as tragedy, then as farce”?) is the “occupation” of the ICE detention center in the novel’s final scene; Adam and his family push past a single, pathetic officer (“Isn’t pushing wrong?” Luna asks; “Great question,” Adam thinks) and participate in a short-lived sit-in, complete with cross-legged singing, like a bad imitation of the 60s hippie movement—back when Adam’s parents “felt that history was alive.” (“Fail again. Fail better”?)
“It embarrassed me, it always had,” Adam reflects. “But I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.”
It’s the last line of the novel, and an impressively decisive one. But it’s hard not to interpret Adam’s optimistic final note, the longed-for “light at the end of the tunnel”—the end of one history, and the beginning of another—as willfully blind to what Slavoj Žižek often warns might be the source of the approaching light: another train, on course for a head-on collision.
Of course, Lerner should not be discredited for this—on the contrary; even if his characters are only thinly-veiled versions of himself and his family, their hopes and dreams are still, like his novels, fictions.
What The Topeka School dares to reveal is the eternal danger that, just as the “man-children” are farcical imitations of their forefathers (“How many of Darren’s own small movements and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness?”), so too may be those trying to combat them, like Lerner’s alter-ego Adam.
If the “man-children” set the terms of the debate, as they currently do, then they also set the limits, predetermine how that debate can be disrupted, resisted—spread thin.
As Adam’s mother, Jane (known as “the Brain” at the Foundation), reflects, at the high school national debate championship, his senior year: “Maybe I’d offered my boy up to the wrong tutelage, the Brain had offered him to the Men, thinking he would know better. And now he was a graduate of the Topeka School.”
- The Topeka School by Ben Lerner is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.