The Topeka School

“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.” 

When Adam is searching for his girlfriend Amber at night, he accidentally enters the wrong house, due to the fact that all of the houses in the neighborhood have nearly the same style and layout. This amplifies the sameness underlying American life, in which White suburban Americans recapitulate identical social cycles. Adam finds an element of sublimity in this “sameness”—there is something both fearful and awe-inspiring to America’s sprawling, identical suburbs.

“[Adam] wondered if these patterns [...] were unique to him, evidence of some specialness or damage, or if they were universal, if everyone saw them. But they were so faint and difficult to describe that he was never able to figure out if his parents or friends shared this experience just above the threshold of perception; the patterns dissipated under the weight of language, remained irreducibly private.” 

When Adam closes his eyes, he sees colorful shapes and other “little illuminated patterns” on the inside of his eyelids (15)—a phenomenon known as phosphenes. These images frustrate Adam—he is unable to properly describe them so he cannot share this experience with his friends or family, or discover whether they have experienced similar phenomena. The passage touches upon a larger theme, the desire to build community or bonds through language, and the failure of language to capture the entirety of experience.

“[Adam] touched a wrestling state-championship banner hanging in the foyer with the distance of an anthropologist or ghost.”

Adam observes a wrestling banner—an emblem of traditional masculinity—with scientific detachment, studying it for insight into a culture foreign to him. Even though Adam can separate himself from his social context and see it dispassionately and objectively, he remains deeply enmeshed in the (misogynistic) forms of masculinity practiced by his high school peers. Adam’s ability to be an “anthropologist” of his own kind is merely a surface veneer on a much more deeply internalized behavior.

“It was as though Samuels had somehow intuited that, in my fourth-floor walk-up on 108th and Amsterdam, I’d become a kind of Ziegler. He’d come to understand the tongues of beasts at the cost of his reason, while I was destroying human language to reveal the river of nonsense coursing just beneath its ‘good, sound rules.’” 

As a graduate student, Jonathan conducts experiments in which his subjects repeat the words recorded on a gradually sped-up tape, which eventually reaches such a fast speed that the subjects are speaking gibberish without realizing it—a phenomenon known as speech shadowing. Jonathan believes his experiments reveal the chaos and meaningless underlying the façade of language’s rationality and clarity. Jonathan compares himself to Ziegler, a character in a short story by Herman Hesse who is driven mad after he begins to understand the language “spoken” by animals at a zoo.

“But I was also 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: the lost boys of privilege.” 

At the Foundation in Topeka, some of Jonathan’s primary patients are White male teenagers who have grown sullen and withdrawn despite living within a culture that privileges their existence. Rather than condemn or judge these boys, Jonathan empathizes with them, bonding with them by channeling their troubled energy into creativity in his Film and Video Department.

“And then, on the other hand, Klaus took [Topeka’s young men] very seriously indeed; they are told constantly, the culture tells them […] that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys.” 

Klaus, a Holocaust survivor and Jonathan’s colleague at the Foundation, argues that the issue with Jonathan’s lost and troubled male teen patients stems from the messages they receive from American culture. American images of masculinity typically celebrate rugged, self-sufficient men, who fight against a world that is out to hurt them. Yet their position in American culture provides them with few outlets to perform rugged toughness, leading to feelings of emptiness and uselessness.

“Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs […] my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded.” 

As Jane recalls her sexual assault during impromptu therapy with her friend Sima, her speech breaks down. The novel echoes Jane’s inability to coherently express her assault: We never learn the details of what happened to Jane. The novel suggests that such acts of misogynistic violence are ultimately outside of reason or logic, and as such, remain inexpressible in language.

“You know how my dad favored Deborah, who’d probably rather be left out of your work; my dad didn’t bother to conceal his preference.” 

Jane speaks to the novel’s unnamed narrator, breaking the fourth wall by directly referring to the act of writing the book. This happens numerous times throughout The Topeka School, blurring the line between the novel’s fictional narrator and its author. Such moments draw attention to the fact that The Topeka School is based on—though differs from—author Ben Lerner’s actual life. His autofiction is a way to distance and yet understand real world events.

“The fighting [between Adam and Jason] resumed […] I found you both insufferable, was saying to myself, I can’t believe I’m a mother of one of these acne-covered, baseball-cap-wearing, sports-obsessed Topekan proto-adolescents.” 

On a trip in New York, a fight breaks out between the middle school-aged Adam and Jason. The fight dismays Jane because she sees Adam’s behavior as a reflection of the sort of violent masculinity that is endemic amongst American White men. Jane fears that Adam will become like the vengeful Men who harass Jane about her book.

“[Darren] must, to fit the type, be not only male, but also white and able-bodied: the perverted form of the empire’s privileged subject.” 

The narrator suggests that Darren disturbs his schoolmates because of his proximity to their identity. As Darren’s disability is primarily intellectual, he outwardly appears to be another “privileged” White teenager. Darren’s male classmates punish and bully Darren to subconsciously “differentiate” themselves from a person whose existence questions the superior status society affords such White men.

“[T]he travesty of inclusion they were playing out with Darren—their intern—was also a citation and critique of the Foundation’s methods; if they were at once caring for and castigating Daren, they were also modeling and mocking their own parents.” 

At the end of Adam’s senior year, he and other boys from his grade begin to include Darren in their social activities, even though they had previously ridiculed and bullied him. This inclusion is both a joke at Darren’s expense and an adherence to the orders of their psychologist parents, who implore their children to make friends with Darren. For Adam, including Darren is a form of acting out against their parents’ polite adherence to social norms.

“The electorate, Adam had read in The Economist, would grow increasingly diverse and the republicans would die off as a national party even if something remained the matter with Kansas […] Adam wanted to believe it was the end of angry white men proclaiming the end of civilization.” 

During Adam’s debate practices, he frequently gets into political arguments with his right-wing coach, Peter Evanson. Though the more progressive Adam argues for liberal causes, Evanson’s superior debate skills mean that Adam loses their debates. Adam takes solace in his belief that the Republican party is primarily composed of older White conservatives, and that their attitudes will disappear as they are replaced by a younger generation—a belief proven false by the later election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the rise of the far-right.

“It is a comfort to Darren that the scenery is looped, although the simulation plays at different speeds; he’s passed that yellow house three times already, the huge American flag.” 

Darren attempts to walk back to Topeka along a highway after his peers abandon him at a lake. Along his walk, Darren perceives that the American suburban landscape is an endless repetition, each town a mirror of other towns. The image of the American flag suggests that such repetition is one of the key mechanisms by which American ideology reproduces itself.

“We were representatives of the most powerful country on earth, the power was in our every cell, look at how the ‘natives’ bowed, their gratitude for our supposedly civilizing force, the future was ours.” 

Jonathan describes the attitude of his diplomatic family in 1960s Taipei—and by extension, most Americans post WWII, when US victory in the war and its economic successes in the 1950s bolstered an image of power. The US government, as well as many Americans at the time, believed that it was America’s duty to spread capitalism and democracy around the globe—ideologies that justified expansionist imperialism. The usage of the phrase “civilizing force” underscores the similarities between such attitudes and 19th-century European colonialism, which violently overthrew the governments of other countries under the guise of spreading civilization.

“I saw these dynamics [amongst the Foundation’s workers], thought seeing them protected me somehow, which is the stupid mistake psychologists make, a very Foundation mistake; we thought that if we had a language for our feelings we might transcend them.”

Jonathan describes the complicated interpersonal dynamics of Foundation psychologists, whose personal relationships often blurred professional boundaries. Though psychology champions the idea that expressing one’s emotions can overcome complicated tensions within relationships, Jonathan suggests that such transcendence is ultimately impossible. The Topeka School extends this argument about language, suggesting that language or reason cannot overcome socially widespread misogyny and racism.

“I never subjected the story to reason, never exposed it to the elements, the damaging oils. It was a small but vital story surviving on the edge of consciousness, where it formed a hinge.” 

As a child, Jane is told a story by her sister about how a cheap gift her Dad bought her is actually a rare item handmade by super-intelligent animals. Though the story is obviously made up, Jane believes it until well into her adult life, until she sees a replica of the cheap gift in a shop window. Jane suggests that often the human mind believes in patently false stories or ideas as what such stories allow us to believe are too important to our everyday existence.

“But there are no grown-ups, that’s what you must grow up to know fully; your parents were just two more bodies experiencing landscape and weather, trying to make sense by vibrating columns of air […] cutting profound truths with their opposites as the regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.” 

As Jane watches teenagers compete at the debate championship tournament, she sees these young men as boys performing the behaviors of adult politicians and other authoritative experts as they argue about current events and government policy. Jane feels that such pretending continues throughout adulthood (“there are no grown-ups”), and that all adults are simply struggling to find their way amidst the chaos of daily life. The final sentence points out that this sense of chaos is a societal problem, as typical structures of “meaning” have become lost in the rapid “spread” of knowledge and information that characterizes contemporary politics.

“[His grandfather’s] voice continued in Adam, then faded, but he knew that it was somewhere in him, had been and would be. How do you rid yourself of a voice, keep it from becoming part of yours? [...] But what if he opened his mouth and his grandfather’s voice came out? Or worse: the disgusting noise from their visit?” 

After hearing a recording of his grandfather’s voice, Adam becomes paranoid that he might not be able to keep his own voice separate from his grandfather’s. Adam fears that the mere act of listening to his grandfather (or understanding him) will lead to becoming like him. Adam’s anxiety is also about internalizing the forms of violent masculinity that his grandfather embodies.

“The [pornographic] image would appear on screens everywhere, and somehow people would know it was his doing, his responsibility […] And the evidence would appear on the screens of the future: your iPhone, the cover of this book. Foreknowledge of the humiliation had caused his mom to flee. The obstinacy of history.”

After shutting down his mom’s computer halfway through loading a pornographic website, Adam becomes paranoid that the image might still be on the computer when his mom turns it on the next morning. His anxiety grows and he imagines that every woman in his life would somehow see the image, and that his act of looking at the image would haunt him for the rest of his life. Adam’s anxiety is an extension of his fraught relationship to his masculinity: He recognizes its problematic nature while also continuing to engage in its practices (such as looking at demeaning pornography).

“On this night Adam managed [in his freestyling] to rise above the stupid violence of the battles and misogynist clichés and enter a zone in which sentences unfolded at a speed he could not consciously control […] what mattered was that language, the fundamental medium of sociality, was being displayed in its abstract capacity, and that he would catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of grammar as pure possibility.”

At high school parties, Adam uses his prowess as a poet to freestyle rap, expertly making rhymes full of “misogynist clichés.” The appeal of such freestyle rapping is the formal artistry Adam accomplishes as he bends grammar in unconventional ways. Adam is capable of separating language’s content and its form.

“Click on the cue ball and drag it to the edge of the table and place it alongside Mandy Owen’s face, which is in profile; when the mouse is released, it strikes her three inches below the temple, shattering the jaw in several places, dislodging multiple teeth, knocking her unconscious, forever altering her speech.”

As the narrator describes Darren’s violent assault of Mandy Owens, he breaks the fourth wall, so that his description of the violent incident is mediated through his own descriptions of writing about the violence in his novel. The narrator (later revealed to be adult Adam) imagines that his act of writing the novel on his computer is partially what causes the violence. In this way, the narrator implicates himself in Darren’s act.

“Come on, I said to my girls, and when Luna said no, I snapped at her: Now, I hissed’ come right now or we’re going straight home; I’m the father, I’m the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.” 

In a playground altercation with an obstinate father, Adam is immediately provoked into embodying the traditional authoritative father figure as he orders his daughters to listen to and obey him. For Adam, this act of becoming “archaic” echoes literature’s failure to “overcome” masculine violence. In this moment, Adam recognizes that merely analyzing and understanding male violence cannot stop it.

“Darren is heavier than the last time you saw him, bearded, almost certainly armed […] he is wearing the red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence. If your eyes were to meet, only the little mimic spasms would indicate recognition.” 

At a poetry reading in Topeka, adult Adam recognizes Darren in a protest crowd. In the years since they have known each other, Darren has become a far-right Trump supporter (indicated by the red baseball cap). Adam’s avoidance of meeting Darren’s eyes suggests that Adam perceives an element of himself within Darren’s radicalization.