The Topeka School is about a teenage boy who thinks he’s learning to be ‘a man’, when in fact he’s learning a load of rubbish that he’s going to have to unlearn. The author Ben Lerner barely fictionalises his youth in the 1990s in Topeka, Kansas. His fictionalized self, Adam Gordon, gets drunk in the basements of large but creepily identical houses with his social circle, the kids of affluent professionals who have never walked anywhere in their lives, throwing absurd gang signs at one another before a beat-down.

The story always feels focused even as the narrators (Adam, his mother and his father) range over topics as diverse as psychiatry, the Westboro Baptist Church and permanently drunk US diplomats and their families in 1950s Taiwan. These diverse component parts orbit around a sudden act of violence at one of those drunken basement parties, and around the themes it brings up.

We see brief snapshots of the life of Darren, a kid Adam’s age who appears to have a serious learning disability. Darren imagines that he has survivalist skills because he owns a knife collection and hides a stash of chocolate bars in the bushes. If he was black, Lerner reminds us, Darren would be in mortal danger from the cops, and if he were a girl, from sexual predators. On the other hand, Darren occupies a strange place in his social world and becomes semi-ironically popular with his peers. But the opening scene is a flash-forward to Darren being held in a police station after an unspecified crime, so we know things are not going to end well. In a touch I found moving, the adult Darren still drinks hot water as his preferred beverage – a habit that goes back to his childhood when his parents would be drinking coffee and he would want to join in. The hot water reminds us that he was once a cute kid with loving parents.

Adam is a debating champion. Lerner describes his competitions as a kind of bizarre ritual, ‘the white noise after the end of history.’ In fast-talking babble, teenagers in suits demonstrate by flawless logic that welfare payments will lead to overloaded court systems, which will lead to civil collapse, which will lead to nuclear holocaust – ‘almost every plan, no matter how minor, would lead to nuclear holocaust.’ For Adam, the debating has its healthy and unhealthy sides: it is at once a way to express himself artistically and a socially-acceptable way for him to be aggressive. When I did debating, ten-plus years after Adam and on the other side of the Atlantic, it was not this bad. But all I’ll say is, I ran into more than one character like Adam’s smarmy young debating coach, whose methods of argument prefigure online trolling.

But, the author reminds us, even before the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter storms, people were overloaded with disorienting babble every day. The strange ritual of the debaters is no worse than the rapid-fire ‘terms and conditions’ at the end of TV and radio ads. This is one of many political-social insights which Lerner shares with us, as he traces in the 1990s the incipient trends which are going supernova in our own time.

The central question is how a boy turns into ‘a man,’ whatever that means. Various adult men serve as role models for Adam. But then there are ‘The Men’, the adult male strangers who would ring his family’s house regularly to threaten and harass his mother, a well-known author (based on Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger). Adam’s obvious contempt for ‘The Men’ (his mother figures out a clever way to prank them back) does not compensate for the fact that they really scare him. Make your best attempt to psychoanalyze the strange flashback in which Adam, while still a small child, encases his penis in chewing-gum. Like a lot of other things in this deeply intriguing novel, neither he nor his parents, a poet and two shrinks, can quite figure it out.

The Topeka School, 2019, FSG Originals

Note: I wrote this review two or three years ago, then lost it in a folder and lately stumbled on it. I can report from this vantage point in time that the novel stayed fresh in my mind even though my review didn’t.

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