Ben Lerner's The Topeka School Reviewed at BOMB

At BOMB, poet and author Ben Lerner's newest, The Topeka School (FSG), is reviewed by Ryan Meehan. "At the height of its power, Lerner’s work crystallizes the sensation of networked life as a kind of inter-reference where the boundaries between language and reality bend and blur," writes Meehan. More:

The question before Lerner, then, in his formidable third novel, is how to bring this futurist aesthetic into alignment with a story of the past. The Topeka School is an effort at a bildungsroman proper, a fictionalization of his own youth in Kansas in the late nineties. But it is also an effort to press the boundaries of autofiction laid out in his first two novels. To mind and world, Lerner has added history—one whose telos is, both personally and nationally, conjured in advance.

The Topeka School uncovers the origins of our contemporary language as they are refracted in the linguistic origins of one of its contemporary practitioners, i.e. the author-protagonist. Readers may recognize the hero of Atocha Station, Adam Gordon, about six years younger, and in third-person this time. Adam is a high school senior in affluent suburban Topeka with an affinity for extemporaneous speech that lends itself well to hip hop freestyling and, more significantly, to competitive high school debate. It’s in the successive rounds of the national debate tournament that a recurring motif in Lerner’s work surfaces at its strongest: a vision of language as something material, constitutive, embedded in reality; a substance at the point of exchange between subject and object...

Read the full review at BOMB.