The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Once upon a time there was fiction and there was memoir and there was autobiography. Sometimes fictional works were labelled as 'autobiographical', either with or without an author's acquiescence. In the 1970s however, a new genre called 'autofiction' emerged, thanks to the French writer Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term for his novel 'Fils' which was a fictional account of events in his own life. Recently, perhaps because of our growing appetites for 'reality' entertainment, this genre has suddenly gained new impetus and popularity. Writers are at it wherever you look. But if you want to read the best-of-the-best example of how powerful this type of writing can be, then you should rush to your local bookshop (or Amazon) and buy the remarkable Ben Lerner's 'The Topeka School'.

The protagonist of the novel is Adam Gordon, a bright student in Senior School, an accomplished debater, orator and would-be poet, who, through a lot of agonised effort, is also part of the cool set.
This is a pretty accurate profile (as Ben Lerner testifies) of the author in his youth, as is the fact that, Adam, like Ben, has parents who are psychologists and a mother who has written a famous book on the subject. There is no doubt that knowing of these parallels adds a certain frisson for the reader. For it is impossible not to experience a shiver of, 'OMG, what do his loved ones/friends think of him saying that?' whenever the author makes especially personal revelations, with say, references to sexual indiscretions or other darker events that take place in the story (no spoilers).

Cleverly though, what also hangs in the air is uncertainty as to the exact boundaries between what Lerner is reporting on and what he is making up, for of course the writer's imagination is at play too, and there is no way of constantly monitoring the veracity of the twists of the plot. All of this gives the novel an alluring ambiguity, which in itself feels like a profound truth. For what can we really be sure of in this world? If things exist purely in our heads, does that make them any the less real? Where do the boundaries between truth and falsehood - between fact and fiction - lie anyway? And who decides them?

More importantly, 'The Topeka School' is a beautifully and brilliantly written novel, brimming with thrilling intellectual insight and penetrating psychological sensitivity. Lerner sweeps us back and forth through Adam's growing up in a way that is irresistibly engaging. He is a young man trying not to fall apart, striving to be taken seriously, and clinging to the hope that the world he occupies can, if analysed rigorously enough, be understood. Every aspect of his privileged white - very male - education and family circumstance have told him that it can. Yet bad things happen, and Adam finds himself very poorly equipped to deal with them. Gradually, his world, his sense of self, implodes. At which point the reader starts to realise that this is not a story of one young man, but of an entire generation, misled and lost among sets of social rules that no longer work, if they ever did. Ben Lerner may be Adam Gordon, but he is also every other educated young white man on the planet.





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