Anxieties of Cohesion: On Ben Lerner’s "The Topeka School"

Ben Lerner | The Topeka School | FSG | October 1, 2019 | 304 Pages

Consider, briefly, the stand-out works of autofiction—Knausgaard, Cusk, and Heti might come to mind—and you’ll find a hodge-podge of texts that, barring the glue of the moniker itself, are held together by only a smattering of traits. Huddled uncomfortably beneath the raggedy umbrella of genre and perhaps forced to mingle, however, these books might discover they have a few things in common after all—like, for instance, the typically international and cosmopolitan flair on which their pervading sense of steely alienation rests. Significantly, in your average autofictional text, the aimless ambulations of its narrator, unfolding in a strangely rarefied present, are buoyed out of boredom by the density of incident present in a city. 

Ben Lerner’s two previous novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, both toe the genre line in this sense, with the first taking place in Madrid and the second in New York City. Constant interpretation and a sort of glum flaneurialism pervade both books, which are speckled with the minor congeries peculiar to the artistic class—museum visits and gallery openings, art shows and poetry readings and lunches with agents. But what would happen if the same desperately prismatic consciousness, accustomed to pinballing from one cultural touchstone to the next, found itself dropped unceremoniously into the profound openness of the American Midwest? And, more importantly, what adjustments to the autofictional formula would have to be made? 

Centering around the family life of Adam Gordon, Lerner’s lightly fictionalized alter ego, The Topeka School returns to Lerner’s youth in Kansas in the late 1990s, and seems a conscious attempt to expand the purview of his own brand of autofiction. In one sense, the novel’s polyphony, which incorporates the voices of Adam’s parents, is a way of allowing autofictional tropes to reenter the narrative (his father, Jonathan, recounts a visit to the Met in 1969, delivering a recondite exegesis of Duccio’s Madonna and Child). But perhaps more importantly, it’s also plumbly in line with Lerner’s muse-like interest in Whitman, whose transcendent democratic vision and co-opting of voices is central to the mission of The Topeka School and its investigations of “bad forms of collectivity.” 

“Americans,” as Gilles Deleuze once wrote in a brief essay on Whitman, “have a natural sense for the fragment, and what they have to conquer is the feel for the totality.” Whitman’s great achievement, of course, was to paradoxically take the fragment and make it the foundation of totalizing compositions like “Song of Myself.” In The Topeka School, Lerner sets himself the similar task of grasping the soul of the Midwest obliquely, through the assumption of new, and other, voices. The inherent fragmentation that he sees in the Midwest—filled as it is with isolated small towns all brimful of “bad forms of collectivity”—thus becomes mirrored in the form of the novel itself, a way of fighting fire with fire. Like Whitman’s poetry, The Topeka School, for all its boundless self-psychologizing, is really about the communal mind.  

Lerner doesn’t simply view the Midwest as a sociocultural mindset, however, but as an actual, inhabited topography—that is, as a space, albeit a fundamentally empty one—though there’s a strange sublimation at work. The Topeka School loves to make connections, to spell things out, but Lerner often pulls up short when it comes to interpreting the Midwest itself. When Adam’s father, a psychologist at the novel’s titular psychological foundation, sets about to correct the “rage at emptiness” his white male patients experience, the diagnosis is of course about the loss of traditional—and traditionally violent—rites of masculine passage, but it also seems to be a subtle gibe at the flat extensity of Midwestern space and the sense of spatial purgatory that Lerner links to a disturbing mental clabbering.

Instead of the liberating differences of the city, the Midwest of The Topeka School presents a front of mass-produced, consumerist sameness. When Adam stumbles into a stranger’s home in the middle of the night, mistaking it for his girlfriend’s, his reflections on the sublimity of identical housing layouts read like a strange form of postmodern transcendentalism:

“Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house, with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once; the sublime of identical layouts. … [I]f you opened any of the giant stainless-steel refrigerators or surveyed the faux-marble islands, you would encounter matching, modular products in slightly different configurations.”

Modularity turns out to be a key concept in The Topeka School. As reflected in the compartmentalization of Adam’s psyche (he’s at once a creatined proto-bro and a poet), modularity represents a sort of facile reconciliation of opposites that Lerner associates with the American mind’s “adolescence without end.”

Lerner finds in modularity—which, as a form of quickly filling up abundant space, is fittingly Midwestern—a type of extension that degrades subjecthood. At one point, overcome by the abundance of products on display at a superstore named Hypermart (which, disturbingly, existed from 1987 to 2000), Adam notes that to be “a subject here was to be spread by objects.” The “spread,” importantly, is one of the novel’s reigning motifs, referring to the glossolalic strategy in forensics of excessively cramming arguments into a debate period, so that an opponent won’t have time to address all of them.

Unsurprisingly, “the spread” spreads, rolling over and assimilating new meanings like one of those ghoulish ectoplasmic blobs that terrified Americans in the 1950s. Oddly, though, it’s never explicitly connected to the spread of the landscape. The anxieties of the Whitmanian mission—of achieving a sense of community through the writtenness of the world—turn out to be intractably twined with the anxieties of autofiction itself. Can autofiction effectively represent the Midwest? Lerner’s answer, as best as it can be made out, would seem to be a qualified yes—qualified because the Midwest-as-subject fractures, like a jutting iceberg, the narrator-centric unity of a traditional autofictional work. 

The emptiness and expansion of the Midwest, so allusively touched on, produce an anxiety of cohesion that, undealt with, leads to the book’s few flaws. It’s undoubtedly responsible for the book’s awkward sociological bent, for instance. It’s why the subplot about Darren—a lost boy whose italicized tale of growing rage bookends each of the novel’s sections and is meant to unify the text’s investigations of white male rage—feels tangential and tacked-on. It’s also, most likely, why the book feels the need to make such a grandly etiological gesture, as though Lerner were making up for the lack of some more subtle cohesion. It’s not, in the end, that autofiction fails when confronted with the Midwest. It’s just that there are, unmistakably, signs of stumbling. 

This review is part of our Contemporary Literature series, where we review books that traditionally gain traction outside of the midwest in order to bridge the intellectual gap between Cleveland, the Midwest, and the coasts, and create an arena in which all three can be in conversation with each other on equal footing.