Seeing the poisonous dangers of rage
Ben Lerner’s third novel The Topeka School is a subtle and nuanced study of male violence, finds Michael McGirr.
Towards the end of Ben Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School, there is a scene of restrained but disturbing violence. By this stage, Adam Gordon – whose voice is one of three that Lerner uses to slowly circle around the moral core of the novel – has two daughters of his own, Luna and Amiya. He takes them to a local park where a boy aged seven or eight won’t let the girls have their turn on the equipment. The boy’s father sits on a bench to one side, disengaged.
When Adam asks him to help resolve the conflict, the man is also obnoxious. Everything in Adam’s mind tells him to walk away, to make excuses for the ‘‘bad father’’, to avoid escalation. But he doesn’t. The scene ends with Adam knocking the father’s phone out of his hand.
The context of this scene makes it potent. In a few pages, Lerner shows ripples of male rage eddying in a playground. A boy scares girls as Adam watches his daughters beginning ‘‘to internalise whatever life lesson’’. A father bullies another father with increasingly aggressive complacence. That other father, Adam, strikes out in frustration.
Adam, happens to be a man of words. All his life, they have been his weapon of choice. He has been a champion public speaker and debater, activities that the book elaborates in exhaustive detail almost as if they are contact sports. Now the articulate father lashes out at a stranger’s phone.
This may not be the most important thing that happens in this subtle and nuanced novel, one whose many layers seep through each other in ways that will send the reader back to earlier sections to discover the full significance of what is going on. Yet the scene in the playground shows the worlds of The Topeka School in microcosm. Lerner shows with remorseless elegance how rage remains poisonous.
Lerner grew up in Topeka, the capital of Kansas, a place that is geographically and metaphorically in the centre of the United States. He was educated in a place very like the school in this novel. Topeka is also the home of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Pointedly, this novel is set on the other side of the fence from that mob.
Adam’s parents, Jane and Jonathan, provide the two voices that – together with Adam’s – gradually compile the story. They are both academics and Jane has won national fame as the author of a book that provides women with advice on how to live a life of their own. It is suggested that Jane has been abused by her father, but that experience is never described.
Jane’s success creates tension with her friend Sima. She becomes famous enough to attract the unwanted attention of a group of religious cranks. It would be easy for this book to unload on such an easy target. But it doesn’t. It prefers to painstakingly disentangle the rage of the privileged and verbose.
Lerner never uses such a cliche as toxic masculinity. He is far too fluent to resort to such well-worn expressions. Instead, he invests in the character of Darren, a young man with few friends. When finally invited to a party, he is involved in a foolish escapade that results in significant injury to a young woman.
Adam’s father claims that America is ‘‘adolescence without end’’ and, certainly, the aftermath of this event helps create the choppy emotional climate of the book. Lerner is interested in the ways in which so much beneath the surface stays the same. The blokes get blokier. Their sentences become more opaque.
Anyone who has encountered Lerner’s fine essay, The Hatred of Poetry, will understand where he is coming from. In the essay, he writes that ‘‘the poem is always a record of failure’’. It is acceptance such as this that makes The Topeka School a success. – Sydney Morning Herald
Michael McGirr is the dean of faith at St Kevin’s College, Melbourne, and the author of Books That Saved My Life (Text).