The Topeka School: Review
The Midwest, The Male Psyche
In this edition of Thinking Aloud, I’ve penned a review of Ben Lerner’s new novel The Topeka School - a novel that follows a Midwestern liberal family as they navigate anger, desire, language. This is a novel that asks us to examine the gaps between our sincerely held ideals and our behavior.
But before I jump into that, here’s two items of note.
First, the new Celine Dion album is now on Spotify. It is well mixed, pop-heavy but infused with jazz, R&B, and soul. “Perfect Goodbye” gave me some feels.
Second, you know the pro wrestler John Cena (how could you not?) Well, in Pulitzer quality journalism, The Week reports that Cena “used to eat '10,000 calories' of Tic Tacs before his wrestling matches.”
Thanks be to God.
The Topeka School: A Profile of Lost Boys
The boys are adrift in Ben Lerner’s latest novel The Topeka School. This isn’t a dramatic lostness, as when the mountaineer is stranded on a peak during a snowstorm. It’s more the xanax prescription variety for privileged white kids who experience their boredom like a disease. But no, it’s more existential even then that, more Hediggarian: the flatness of the Midwest, all expansive sky and land, all relative, no absolute point of reference with which to order one’s horizons. It’s like you take the hierarchical structure of Dante’s cosmology, blow it up, and then within the spinning fragments, you ask these anxious emerging adults to situate themselves. Surveying the homes in his lakehouse community, our high school protagonist Adam notes that in each one, “the faces and poses in the family photographs on the mantel might change, but would all belong to the same grammar...the elements of the painted scene might vary, but not the level of familiarity and flatness.”
What is the “mid” in Midwest? If the North is the center of industry, the South the land of front porch hospitality, the West the wild frontier, what exactly is the middle, the midway? Is it flyover country? A motley collection of forgotten family farms, and lonely railroad tracks? Or heartland - a place that still pulses with traditional American values? Or Trump country - a radioactive wasteland wherein angry and alienated rural folk give the finger to coastal elites? Lerner is in a particularly interesting position to speak to this question. A Topeka native, he earned his MFA from Brown. In these pages, you can feel Lerner working through the puzzle. Who most accurately represents Topeka, the optimistic liberals carrying a Booker shortlisted novel in their New Yorker tote bag, or the aimless white teenagers in MAGA hats driving around in jeeps blasting hip-hop and saying the n-word because they know they shouldn’t?
What we if consider Midwesterness as a metaphor for that midway point between the aspirational self and the appetitive self. What if Midwestern is the oxygen-sucking space between the values we profess and the passions we suffer? Adam’s mother Jane worries that “maybe we should have raised him among the liberal cosmopolitans of San Francisco and New York.” Reflecting on the transgressions of sons, Adam’s parents note that “of course they knew better, but knowing is a weak state; you cannot assume your son will opt out of the dominant libidinal economy, develop the right desires from within the wrong life." The two strongest animal impulses, the ones that just can’t be fully excised or restrained, in this novel as in life, are sexual desire and aggression. And as is often the case, much of the time in the novel, these two go together.
The act of violence - perpetuated by a thinly written character that exists as a foil for Adam - feels inevitable, though it is not. It is simply a predictable reaction when the last vestige of a young man’s pride is deftly swept away by the cruel taunts of a tantalizing young woman in the presence of posturing, insecure male peers. And he, wounded and enraged, grabs the eightball from the pool table, flight-fight-freeze, fight...
The Topeka School is not really about what makes boys aggressive and men violent. The answer to that question is provided as a given. We are prone to violence to the extent that we have a fragile sense of self: respect us, we beg, seethe, rage, or else. (And the violence lies in that or else.) Respect Adam, for his mental acuity and his sexual prowess, and especially in those moments when the two coincide. (Adam speaking his spells in class, Adam giving oral, Adam with the techniques to win debate competitions or pleasure his girlfriend: the novel’s clever wordplay, ‘cunning linguist, cunnilingus.’) Above all, do not laugh at Adam, do not laugh, dear mother, when Adam-as-boy develops anxiety about his, er, manhood, and glues over it with gum. And do not laugh, dear girlfriend, when Adam struggles to man the boat. (“He could not admit that he’d been scared...”)
Does the Midwestern locale deepen the crisis of masculinity? After all, Adam realizes that his peers possess the “basic Midwestern mechanical competency, could change their oil or clean a gun, whereas he couldn’t even drive stick.” Is this feeling of inadequacy, of not measuring up to the context he is in, why he was so embarrassed about that incident with the boat - about how his girlfriend had snuck away as he soliloquized, and how he hadn’t noticed that he was alone? Adam’s father Jonathan tells us he is encountering more and more “patients whose suffering wasn’t clearly related to their circumstances, or whose circumstances were most notable for their normality - intelligent middle-class white kids from stable homes who were fine until they weren’t.” Jonathan calls them the “lost boys of privilege.” His practice as a therapist is about “finding a way to get people, especially reticent Midwestern boys and men, to talk.”
Jane, the feminist scholar, the target of misognyistic phone calls from the men whose girlfriends and wives she counsels, does not exactly sympathize with this weakness of men who cannot bear to see themselves as weak. “I couldn’t really take them seriously,” she tells us, “or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity.” Is there anything more pathetic, for this self-possessed if not quite self-assured Midwestern liberal, then the sputtering rage of the incel? But then as an aside, she notes more ominously that “of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.” (And isn’t it precisely the problem that we don’t take the sputtering rage seriously until that act of violence which seems so inevitable but is very much not?) But then again, she does take her own son seriously, observing that “when he wasn’t being an asshole, he was funny, curious, kind.” Can we only love the “lost boys” when they are our sons?
And then there’s sexual desire, considered apart from violence. Jonathan, the noted psychologist who reaches out to these lost boys, and feels lost himself. For all of his virtues, real or simply self-perceived, it is Jonathan who is unfaithful, it is Jonathan who fucks his wife’s therapist while on vacation with her family and his own. “We thought that if we had language for our feelings we might transcend them.” But no, that is never how that works. For despite all the words in the world, sex is mediated through smell of scent and touch of skin, and what does that mean for the Midwestern gentlemen, no longer faithful, no longer gentle when he rages against his wife in the inevitable confrontations that follows? Raging, raging, because he is not in control, because he knows better, because he does not act better, because he is so weak.
Another haunting question the novel asks in the wake of violence: where were the parents? “Some were watching Friends or Frasier.” This is to say that all of the parents - some more present with their children than others - were unequal to the challenge of preventing the violence, of seeing and responding to the lostness that preempted that violence. And of course that is the case. For while the younger Adam is fist-fighting with his friend on a family vacation, his father is, well, you know.
The question at the heart of the novel is not why violence, but rather, what keeps most of us from it? (What must I do to be saved?) How is it exactly that a (white) privileged, anxious, often egotistical and selfish boy like Adam can transition into the kind of father who only occasionally lashes out at the asshole dad on the playground, and then only in a muted aggression that falls short of violence? I am not at all sure the novel gives a satisfying answer to that question. Maybe it is simply that Adam gets lucky. And maybe it is a singular miracle whenever a boy becomes a man who is not lost, who is not violent, who loves a woman and remains faithful to her. I suspect that most of us spend most of our lives in the Midwest, the gap between aspiration and reality, but maybe the miracle is that there’s grace in the Midwest too.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
There’s this new off-Broadway play called Heroes of The Fourth Turning that explores a sub-culture of conservative Catholic liberal art grads who protest abortion, struggle with porn, defend Trump, feel lost and alienated. The play is getting rave reviews from the Right and Left. I haven’t seen it, but this Commonweal review is excellent: “Just as each of us must die alone, each must suffer alone, no matter how many friends we have to comfort us as we do. Does our religion just obscure this second reality, or does it somehow answer it? Is it cure, palliative, or just placebo? That’s one of the many questions this play asks and pointedly declines to answer.”
Speaking of abortion…it’s a complex issue, rarely covered with the nuance that is required. But this essay in The Atlantic puts forward the best arguments on both sides. It’s a hard read but so important.
General Mattis has an exemplary essay in The Atlantic: here’s an excerpt: “"We all know cynics. From time to time, we all fall prey to cynicism. But cynicism is corrosive when it saturates a society—as it has long saturated Russia’s, and as it has saturated too much of ours. Cynicism fosters a distrust of reality. It is nothing less than a form of surrender. It provokes a suspicion that hidden malign forces are at play. It instills a sense of victimhood. It may be psychically gratifying in the moment, but it solves nothing."
In the New Yorker, a wonderful profile of Justice Elena Kagan, the most pragmatic and perhaps least ideological justice on the Court. Excerpt: “I think of Justice Kagan as a little bit like my old boss Justice Stevens—a common-law judge who takes each case as it comes to her. She’s sort of a judge’s judge. She loves statutory interpretation. The craft of puzzling through competing arguments and sources of authority..."
Prose poetry is hit or miss for me. This piece in The Other Journal is a definite hit: “There is data, but also improvisation. Trust your intuition, and don’t. Allow history to analyze itself, to split like the atom, to cast its particles in every direction, to sing like the rubbed rim of a glass. The old guy said it all comes down to three things: Oh honey, I’m lonely with you, I’m lonely without you, I’m walking in the woods and I feel a little religious.”