Ben Lerner again walks the outer edges of prose form and perspective in his third novel, The Topeka School, a book “about family and art and memory and meaning, how it’s made and unmade,” to borrow a line from one of its many extraordinary passages.
The obsession humming under the well-wrought, perfectly paced, at times riveting scenes about family and art and memory, etc. is the troubling (to say the least) rise in power of the man-child, the Large Adult Son, and his penchant for violence and tyranny. The gender-based expectations that many of us (often unconsciously) patrol and enforce keep America and its leaders in a state of “adolescence without end,” to borrow another extraordinary line from the book, and they course through all the boys and men in this book.
