The Topeka School

A Novel

By: Ben Lerner

Narrated by: Nancy Linari, Peter Berkrot, Tristan Wright

Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

2019 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year

2019 NPR Best Book of the Year

2019 National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee

2019 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year

2019 Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year

2019 NYT Outstanding Books of the Year

2019 The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

2020 Folio Prize Shortlist

2019 Washington Post Best Books of the Year

2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year

2019 New York Magazine Best Books of the Year

2020 Pulitzer Prize - Finalist

2019 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year

2019 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year

2019 NYPL Book for Reading and Sharing

Named one of the most anticipated fall books by Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Vogue, Vulture, The Observer, Kirkus, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Week, Oprah Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Nylon, Pacific Standard, Publishers Weekly, Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Guardian

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. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. 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. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart - who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient - into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

Cover photograph from The Wichita Eagle. © 1990 McClatchy. All rights reserved. Used under license. Kansas.com

©2019 Ben Lerner (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Great novel, narration flawed...

A beautiful novel, a beautiful writer. The story was graceful and quiet but moved swiftly, I couldn’t put it down. I felt like it was moving towards something major with the Darren character but it kind of didn’t— regardless of that I still thought it was great. One note is that one of the narrators should know how to pronounce popular musicians names/musical acts, such as Brian Eno (it’s pronounced “eee-no”) and for crying out loud, The Fugees are world famous and pronounced like slang for word “refugee” and not like “FOO-GEES.” How did no one notice this during editing? Embarrassing. It’s 2020 come on.

interesting, unique and compelling

A strong investigation of language, meaning and noise. Not as political as other reviewers complain.

Droll

I listened to this book and still have no idea what it what’s about. There were several points of view...and I have no idea why. The ending was a bit baffling, seeming to come from nowhere, and the main point of the story is completely lost on me.

Fugue Ease

One of the narrators pronounced the name of the Fugees incorrectly as "Fugue Ease" and I think the author would be ashamed, considering it is a coming of age tale set in the late nineties.

Another amazing Lerner

Really loved it. Great narrators. Wildly complex and beautiful story. I say listen to it right now.

The best book I’ve listened to in years.

This has been the most enjoyable book to listen to that I’ve heard in years.

BULLY FOR YOU

Ben Lerner is a writer with academic and literary awards that attest to his intelligence and accomplishment.

“The Topeka School” makes one wonder what makes a child become a bully. Does affluence have anything to do with it? Is it because of superior intelligence? Is it because of genetic pre-disposition? Lerner creates a boy’s childhood that suggests some bullies do come from the aforementioned.

The structure of “The Topeka School” is disconcerting and may make some reader/listeners put the book down. The book will lose some who cannot identify with Lerner’s characters because of their social status and accomplishment in life. The struggles of the Gordon family seem distant from the lives of many people who do not come from families as smart or financially accomplished as those in Lerner's story.

challenging

it took a long time (I was almost done) for this book to teach me how to read it. I found the application of multiple literary gimmicks disorienting, but by the time I got to the end, I suspected the author intended exactly that effect. When I got it, I was impressed by the depth and richness with which the story explores its themes.It is probably worth a second read,, but i doubt I will.. I felt like it was an overwhelming indictment of our expectations of modern masculinity with no glimmer of hope or path foward, which made me sad.

Fiction and Fact

Ben Lerner takes licence in The Topeka School. It's a heady mix of masterfullybwritten anecdote, memoir, and the stories which impressed upon his early life in Topeka, Kansas.

Irony aside I note Lerner's Poet's truths are classed fiction; Trump's lies are facts to some. The Topeka School provides a grim cultural portent for pre-pandemic America. Today, Trump's last as POTUS, Harris and Biden commemorate 400k US dead. MAGA? The end of history?

Strong novel about 1990s

Ben Lerner's book is excellent. Very smart about Kansas, town-gown social dynamics, poetry, psychoanalysis,, and more. It is deserving of the wide praise it's earned. It's brainy without being show-offy.

I found the complaints about the political views of the characters to be very strange. What did they expect in a novel about East-Coast Jewish psychoanalysts living in Topeka in the era of Fred Phelps & Co.? The characters' politics (notably Jane) and intellectualism (notably Adam) are not strident or intrusive at all. Regarding that complaint: nothing to see here; move on.

Regarding this audiobook: Two of the voice actors are excellent. They read the narration of Jonathan and Jane, the parents of Adam. These voice actors read, no perform, in a very believable manner: they really do sound as intelligent and thoughtful and, at times, conflicted as Adam's parents. They are both believable as psychoanalysts at the legendary Topeka School. I look forward to every time their characters get some reading time. Those two characters are by far the most interesting narrators in the novel, to these ears at least.

The audiobook's shortcoming is with the voice actor who reads Adam's part--and presumably with the director who was guiding him. Other reviewers have noted the actor's frequent mispronunciations. The Fugees become The FUGUE-EASE. Hobbesian becomes HOB-EASY-AN. And so forth and so on. I didn't make a list, but every time it happened I snapped out of the artwork's air of verisimilitude and into my humdrum world of, like, proper pronunciation of fairly common terms. Also the actor's voice doesn't have the personality and burnish of the voices doing the roles of Adam's parents. Maybe this is to represent the relative callowness of youth, but man is it annoying.

It's unfortunate that such a fine and celebrated novel can have an audio version that, at times, weakens rather than amplifies the power of its prose and its characters. And that the director, engineer, or whomever didn't have the attentiveness to say, 'hey, let's correct the mispronunciations. And can we make Adam's voice less monotone. Hie's more passionate and interesting than he sounds." I think they should do a revised version with a new performance of Adam.