Speech and Violence Collide in ‘The Topeka School’

From the first pages, it’s clear the story will hinge on an act of violence. We see Darren handling the weapon, a billiard ball: “Long before the freshman called him the customary names, before he’d taken it from the corner pocket, felt its weight, the cool and smoothness of the resin, before he’d hurled it into the crowded darkness — the cue ball was hanging in the air, rotating slowly. Like the moon, it had been there all his life.”

Image

Lerner has always written about language with a mixture of gratitude and suspicion, and a particular interest in the breakdown of communication. In “The Topeka School,” he explores obfuscation, and the manipulation of speech in its relationship to violence. He draws links between “the spread” — a rapid-fire form of argument used in debate to introduce an array of information so broad that an opponent cannot possibly respond — and the general coarsening of political language.

“The most common criticism of the spread was that it detached policy debate from the real world,” Lerner writes, “that nobody used language the way that these debaters did, save perhaps for auctioneers. But even the adolescents knew this wasn’t true.” The fine print in financial documents, the patter of health warnings in drug ads — we are steeped in spread. “Even before the 24-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.”

Because Lerner draws so freely from his own life, he is often grouped together with other writers of autofiction, like Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti, which does his work a slight disservice. It ignores his real lineage, the great literature of passivity, failure and refusal: Melville’s Bartleby, the novels of Robert Walser and László Krasznahorkai. The pleasure of his fiction has always been in its disobedience — in plots that make a mockery of the term, characters who shirk their duties. In Lerner’s second novel, “10:04,” the author’s stand-in receives a lecture from his literary agent on how to write a “proper novel”: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table; make sure the protagonist undergoes a dramatic transformation.” This advice, it should be noted, is tucked into the middle of Lerner’s most wayward book to date, a Whitmanesque sprawl about futurity.