This wasmt an enjoyable read and I wouldnt recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

This is a difficult one to rate. There's much to commend the novel for: The writing style, the way it handles some of its topics - toxic masculinity and the descend of debate culture. Unfortunately, the narrative is so disjointed (and I don't normally mind jumping from one POV to another) that it's hard to keep track or warm up to any of them. This wasn't helped by the characters feeling slightly aloof, ungraspable and unrelateable.
The treatment of one of the characters, Darren, left much to be desired - what was the point of including him at all, apart from showing the cruelty of his peers and thereby the cruelty of society?
Ultimately a difficult and unsatisfying read.

Ben Lerner is showing the reader just how clever he is but it doesn't really work in this sprawling confusing novel.
Whilst there are some enjoyable moments in this, they are greatly outweighed by the sheer confusing tangle people and ideas all strung together with sometimes unreadable language that makes the book a real slog at times. The constant flipping between characters and timeframes is confusing, There were multiple moments where I found myself going back pages to try to figure out who, what or where we were, and that can wear a reader down, even if there are some smart portions of the book.

I abandoned this very early on - I just couldn't get into it at all. It was far too clever for its own good.
I rarely bail on books but I did in this instance.

Sorry I just couldn't get into it. I'm sure it's great - just not my thing. I couldn't identify with the characters or find logic to their actions.

I loved Ben Lerner's previous book and recommended it to everyone I met; I'll be doing the same with this one, I'm sure.

This has been on my list for a while. I’d read a lot about Lerner’s novel, how its place in literature marks a change and, being less conventional, the way future prose will evolve, perhaps. Having not read the other two books in the discrete trilogy, this has been my first experience of Lerner’s writing.

Admittedly, The Topeka School is well-written. It focuses on the life of Adam, a public speaking champion, but it’s about so much more: in many ways, it is a social commentary of modern American life, and the role that men play in the world today.

In all honesty, I didn’t really enjoy this book. The switching of perspectives and viewpoints, although technical, made the reading experience disjointed. I found myself losing the narrative thread which affected my overall reaction to this novel.

Adam lives in Topeka, Kansas. He is a successful high school debater and lives with his parents in an affluent neighbourhood. Topeka is a city where differences aren't really tolerated and his parents are psychologists working with the different. When Adam brings an outsider into his social group changes happen and not necessarily for the better.
I loved the start of this book and was completely gripped but that didn't last. The narrative jumps between characters and time frames and somewhere around the middle I started to get lost and my the end it was just determination that got me through. I know this is supposed to be superior literary writing but to me it was just trying to hard.

I am in charge of our Senior School library and am looking for a diverse array of new books to furnish their shelves with and inspire our young people to read a wider and more diverse range of books as they move through the senior school. It is hard sometimes to find books that will grab the attention of young people as their time is short and we are competing against technology and online entertainments.
This was a thought-provoking and well-written read that will appeal to our readers across the board. It had a really strong voice and a compelling narrative that I think would capture their attention and draw them in. It kept me engrossed and I think that it's so important that the books that we purchase for both our young people and our staff are appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible - as well as providing them with something a little 'different' that they might not have come across in school libraries before.
This was a really enjoyable read and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for school so that our young people can enjoy it for themselves. A satisfying and well-crafted read that I keep thinking about long after closing its final page - and that definitely makes it a must-buy for me!

Clever, pyrotechnical writing. Which never loses touch with character or behaviour. Ben Lerner building on reputation as first class wordsmith and forensic eye on the ordinary.

5 stars

The central character in this book is Adam but the narrative is shared between him and his two parents, Jonathan and Jane. The background to the novel is the conservative US city of Topeka where a group of, I was going to say misfit, psychologists have set up a comparatively radical school of psychoanalysis. Everyone seems to be analysing everyone else and nothing can happen without being explored, unwrapped and poked!

No wonder that Adam is a little strange. I found him decidedly disturbed but I think he's meant to be something of a child prodigy with his capacity for taking part in pointless, rhetorical and competitive debates throughout his school career. Later on, he marries and has children but continues to overanalyse himself and others.

There are other characters on the Topeka scene. There's Darren who has learning difficulties as a counterpoint to Adam, an old psychologist called Klaus, and Jonathan and Jane's best friends, Eric and Sima. It's quite a society and the interrelationships are complicated.

The book covers a long period but is largely focused on the 1990s tracking Adam's early schooling to his adulthood during, arguably, a key phase in American history and the story links into contemporary events to help frame the narrative.

Having said all that, there is something odd about it. I didn't exactly warm to Adam and less so to his dysfunctional parents for whom a form of passive aggression linked to psychobabble replaces conversation. The young people in Topeka are also violent and unpleasant ranging from the ones who delight in destroying others in debates to the ones that taunt poor Darren. Is the Topeka school a good thing? I don't know.

So, what's it about? Well, I think it must be something to do with the changed state of America, more angry people, a failure in care and the circumstances which allowed Donald Trump to emerge as president. It's also something to do with how people communicate or don't talk and how everything is a subject for the psychologist and the psychiatrist. There are clues about this but somehow it didn't get me on board with its unlikable characters and fake friends and colleagues.

Autofiction appears to be very modish. Though the term was only coined in 1977 it’s probably been around for ages. I’m not quite sure why I feel resistance to it as a form, or genre. Aren’t all fictitious works, even the most fantastical, a form of autofiction, in that they must be informed, even tangentially, by the writer’s own experience of the word? It seems I’ve read a lot about it, without actually reading it. The descriptions and reviews of much of its celebrated manifestations leave me cold. (Yes, Klaus Ove Knausgard, I’m looking at you, and I’m not too bothered as clearly you’re doing perfectly well with or without my approbation).
In The Topeka School, Adam, as I understand it, is a stand-in for Ben Lerner. I wasn’t sure who Darren, the barely-tolerated outsider who commits an atrocity against a woman with a cue ball, was meant to be. The nerdish, nice and generally politically correct Adam’s shadow side?
This novel has been ecstatically reviewed in places, so I am probably missing something. It’s beautifully written for the most part but, for me, it staggered under the weight of its own significance.
As an aside, the descriptions of top-level high school debating (also autobiographical, I am led to understand) were horribly fascinating. Some contestants use a technique called the spread, in which arguments are shot out at such a machine gun level that their opponents cannot hope to respond to all or indeed most of them. Are school debating contests a thing in the UK? I have no idea. I rather hope not. Like Black Friday and the school prom, America is welcome to keep them to itself.

A writer on the rise, and deservedly so.

This is a lush and beautifully written novel that covers the problems and issues of growing up, manhood and parenthood.

It is sometimes hard to follow and requires massive concentration but it was a joy to read owing to its perception and sheer beauty of the writing.

Intelligent, multilayered and difficult to stop thinking about. Definitely Lerner's most accomplished and mature novel yet. I will be recommending this a lot this Christmas as I'm sure anyone who enjoys literary fiction will love it.

I really enjoyed this intelligent, deceptively slender, dense novel about language and its failures.

Exceptionally well-written and complex narrative delivered by generations of intertwined voices. It’s bad drop, the Topeka School, is a leading centre of psychotherapeutic enquiry in Kansas. It’s both Intellectually and narratively satisfying. Definitely one for anyone interested in psychodynamics.

This is a deeply interesting tale of language and words, family and masculinity. Crossing over generations and meeting the reader with an immediate drop into the world of the novel, The Topeka School packs a big punch in under 300 pages. As an autofiction novels, Lerner experiments to push his own experiences into a consideration of toxic masculinity in the late 1990s Topeka. His protagonist walks a liminal space between two worlds- the measured, Freudian life of his parents as therapists and the rage, violence and anger of his peers. The novel is clear in its view that men use language to ascend and control, while the women of this world are more rounded and ultimately successful communicators. The men in this world speak to erase the person they're speaking to, leaving Lerner with a novel that expresses, in few pages but many words, how we got to the point of Men's Rights Activists and a Trump White House.

As a longstanding fan of Lerner, I had high hopes for this book and it didn't disappoint. He has an incredible talent for crafting complex narratives which collapse in on themselves, producing novels which are not only narratively compelling, but a joy to read. This novel focuses on adolescent boys in Topeka, Kansas, where Lerner himself grew up; but although the book's primary focus is masculinity and its discontents, it also explores a great deal in the realms of (for example) psychiatry, love, and linguistics. For those who are already fans of Lerner's work, I would wholeheartedly recommend; if you're new to him, then I would still recommend The Topeka School, with the advice that the best way to read a Lerner novel is to just lose yourself in it, and once you're done, to read it again.

The opening pages of "The Topeka School" had me gripped. Adam, one of the book's narrators, is talking at his girlfriend in a boat in the middle of a lake, when she disappears - presumably having jumped in, whilst Adam unnoticing, continues his monologue. What follows is a description of Adam's desperate search for her in the identikit houses which surround the shore. This scene touches on many of the novel's themes as well as giving a hint of its strangeness and cool forensic prose.

In the acknowledgements to "The Topeka School", Ben Lerner alludes to 'the unstable mixture of fact and fiction' which is a feature of his second novel. The biography of Adam resembles that of Lerner himself: a childhood spent in the Kansas town of Topeka, a famous therapist for a mother, debating champion, and future poet. However, Lerner does clever things with the material of his life, creating a strange and lovely novel in which compelling characters and plot are mixed with pleasingly destabilizing shifts in perspective and metafictional intrusions, which never feel tricksy. I loved this book and I was sad when I realized that I had come to the final page and that it was time to leave Lerner's world.

My review here of Ben Lerner's The Topeka School here
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