Review originally published on Instagram on July 21, 2020.
Here’s a link to purchase The Topeka School.1
I revisited The Topeka School by Ben Lerner recently. A friend is reading it, and I picked it back up, mostly to leaf through it, to remember what I thought, but I found myself sucked in. I read it for the first time in November, but never posted about it here, because I couldn’t make up my mind about it. My friends all loved it, but I felt there was something unfinished about it. And y’all know, I like my novels a little rough around the edges, but The Topeka School left me unsatisfied. It clearly was trying to say something—about masculinity, about liberalism, about communication and understanding—but I wasn’t sure what.
Part of why I got sucked in a second time is due to how readable Lerner’s prose is. He makes complex sentences & thoughts simple and digestible without losing any nuance—it’s a gift!! And then he’ll have sections of heightened, highly stylized, poetic language, that still is legible in its referentiality. But beyond the straightforward prose, the ideas themselves seem muddled, metaphors are mixed. The primary metaphor of the text: characters struggle with words—sometimes sinking into nonsense that retains meaning only as a “private language,” sometimes into babble that has no meaning at all (“glossolalia without divinity”), and sometimes into wordless action—“if he had the language, he wouldn’t express himself with the symptoms.”
Most of this loss of language—this descent into either complete depersonalization, or, conversely (but not opposingly), complete individualism—is a burden the men of The Topeka School shoulder almost exclusively. Women, when afflicted, largely are able to eventually regain language, and occasionally help men to do the same.
I enjoyed it the novel more on the second read, but I still feel like something isn’t right in The Topeka School. I think it’s the length. Both times I’ve read this book, I get about halfway through, and my interest lags. I think it has to do with this language metaphor: it drags on for too long, it’s leaned on too heavily, and halfway through the book, I’m like, “I get it.” But then it keeps returning, and I have to wonder if I really do “get it,” mostly because I’m unsure why it’s still continuing. Maybe that’s what I really don’t like in the book—I feel like I’m missing something, and I hate feeling dumb. But I also trust myself to say: maybe I’m not missing anything, maybe the book is missing something.
But I do trust Lerner, and I trust my friends enough to ask: what am I missing? As I said, loss of language is clearly a side effect of all this “toxic masculinity.” Anger and anxiety lead to the initial loss of language, which leads to more anger and anxiety. And when the anger & anxiety can’t be expressed through words, it’s expressed through action. And Lerner argues (a little feebly, I think, though not because I disagree) that both toxic masculinity and loss of language contributes to the rise of populism and Trump. Meanwhile, politicians (again, here, specifically the right) communicate with language that means nothing, purposefully obfuscating their true goals. “A crisis of content and of form.”
“I’m the father, I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.”
As you know, I read books by and about women. And if “women be shopping,” women really be talking. It’s something that I’ve discussed here, repeatedly and at length, but I keep returning to. But reading The Topeka School, I realized how frankly uninterested I’ve been in how men talk to one another.
A few weeks ago, E and D and I were playing badminton, and E asked a question that I hear posed by various girl friends at least once a year—“What do guys talk about?” We were all stumped. Clearly a total failure of memory, imagination, and empathy on our parts, and yet: the male characters in The Topeka School never seem able to fully communicate. The only true connection, the only totally fulfilling conversation in the book, is between two women. It’s the only point in which a character who has “lost” her language is able to regain it.
It leaves me a little sad. I know men have fulfilling relationships with each other, and I don’t want to be reductive, but sometimes, when guy friends turn to me with their various emotional drama, I wonder if they’re having the same conversations that they have with me with other guys.
I think a lot about that Joni Mitchell song “Conversation”—“He comes for conversation, I comfort him sometimes. Comfort and consultation, he knows that’s what he’ll find.” And I think about “Rocket Man” by Elton John—“It’s lonely out in space, on such a timeless flight...I’m not the man they think I am at home: I’m a rocket man, burning out his fuse out here alone.”
Anyway, the whopping 15% of my audience that is male should feel free to chime in here. Maybe I’m just parroting dumb stereotypes about masculinity, but honestly, contemporary masculinity seems like a total drag. Also, in the spirit of FULL DISCLOSURE: E, D, and I are sorority girls, two of us went to all girls schools for 15 years, and the third is queer: SO LIKE maybe we aren’t the best people to theorize about masculinity lmao.
Maybe this is all to say, Ben Lerner is a poet, and I don’t understand poetry. Or, Ben Lerner is a man, and I don’t understand men. But that feels kinda weak.
I’m also simultaneously rereading Talk by Linda Rosenkrantz—a book that’s all about girls and gays (ha) finding words and communicating and interpreting each other’s language. It’s the funny feminine inverse of The Topeka School in some ways—and while most of the characters in Topeka are psychologists, everyone in Talk goes to therapy.
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