Book Review: The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
Section of Duccio’s Madonna and Child, Wikimedia Commons
Joe Kenelm reviews Ben Lerner’s latest novel.
The Westboro Baptist Church was founded in 1989 by Fred Phelps, who claimed to have seen two men trying to lure his grandson into some bushes in a park in Topeka, Kansas. It has rarely had more than eighty members, most of them members of the Phelps family. Their signature activity is picketing, bearing placards with inflammatory messages (“God Hates Fags”, “Thank God for AIDS”). In 1998, the Phelps protested the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a homosexual student who had been tortured and beaten to death. The stunt garnered the Church national attention. They gained further notoriety in 2005, picketing the funerals of American soldiers who had died in the Iraq War; they viewed soldiers’ deaths as a manifestation of Providential anger at the USA’s tolerance of homosexuality.
The Phelps crop up regularly in The Topeka School. The central character, Adam, snaps at them as they picket on Washborn University campus; his mother, Jane, a famous writer-psychologist, actually features on some of their faxes, her face superimposed with horns, together with the caption “Jezebelian switch-hitting whore”. (She thinks they are funny, and keeps one on her fridge). The Church’s presence, however, is felt more deeply than propaganda and sidewalk appearances. As Jane points out, the Phelps are denounced for “extreme representations of beliefs so many Topekans held.” She knows only two men in Topeka who are openly gay. When women greet Jane in the supermarket to thank her for her book (“Your book saved my marriage”, “You changed my life”), they press hands, but never hug: “that wasn’t going to happen in the American Midwest”.
It is, as Jane describes it, a “Marlboro Man culture”. Ironically, the rugged cowboy was an advertising campaign initially conceived to counter the “feminine” image of filtered cigarettes: the Marlboro Man, like Topeka’s brand of masculinity, is an empty referent. When Adam and his friends get into a fight with a group of boys from a nearby school, the focus is on the “absurd” hand gestures they make to communicate between themselves, a sign language appropriated from Los Angeles and Chicago street gangs. (Meanwhile, the Topekan kids’ rap battles are the “clearest manifestation of a crisis in white masculinity.”) Adam and one of the boys bump into each other the next day at a Hypermart, both with their mothers in tow. While they each imagine a preposterously-violent fight, a combination of lived experience and Street Fighter II: Championship Edition, the two mums politely introduce themselves. “Was it more, or less, emasculating to have a famous mom?” Adam wonders.
Another character, Darren, has severe mental health issues. So far, he has been left out of the Topeka clique; in Senior Year his peers begin to include him. It is a cruel spectacle. He cuts his hair, buys himself Nike hoodies and baggy jeans, and begins to work out and watch La-Z-Boy music videos. All the same, it is clear he will never fit the bill. This is a “language game in which he is attempting to feign fluency”. At a meth-fuelled party, Adam’s friend brings a drunk girl over to Darren: “kiss her, dog, kiss her”. He only smiles; “he must be a faggot,” she says. The friend goads him, “You gonna let her say that, Darren? I’d tell that bitch to watch her fucking mouth.” He hurls a cue ball at the girl; shattering her jaw, knocking out several teeth, and permanently altering her speech. In 2019, Adam returns to Topeka. He encounters the protesting Phelps, and recognises one of them. It’s Darren. He’s turned to the Westboro Baptists and their macho-sadistic rhetoric to respond, finally, to the girl.
The novel orbits around this shocking episode. It is 1996, Adam is seventeen years old. In many respects, he is a characteristic young adult: opinionated, intelligent, and belligerent. He goes to parties, has sex, drinks, and smokes. But he is also brilliant at public speaking; in the opening chapter, he takes part in an intercollegiate pairs debating competition. He and his fellow-debaters employ a technique called the “spread”, which involves speaking at great speed in order to fit in as many points into the allotted time as possible. The idea is to register more points than the opposition can respond to; in this form of debate, an unaddressed point is judged a ceded point. The “spread” comes at the expense of coherence. Adam’s partner interrogates their opposition’s program to reduce juvenile crime in the United States:
Gregor evidence points to back-backlogged courts as result of increased child support enforcement judicial overload leads to civil collapse leads to nuclear conflict China or North Korea
Policy is divested from rationale (“almost every plan, no matter how minor, leads to nuclear holocaust”); interscholastic debate becomes “glossolalic ritual”. Adam’s greatest strength is extemporaneous speaking, where participants prepare a five minute speech on one of a handful of purposefully-obscure and prickly topics. Adam opts for a question on water disputes in Djibouti, because he “at least knows what water is.” In fact, “extemp.” is about polish over substance. In the national finals, Adam’s coach, Peter Evanson, encourages him to sprinkle his speech with colloquialisms to keep the Minnesota judges on side (“Now in Kansas, we call that a lie”): “I don’t care if they’re not real sayings, just deliver them like they’re tried-and-true.”
Such scholastic eccentricity has wider repercussions. Evanson goes on to mastermind a disastrous Kansas governorship, the most severely right-wing in the state’s history and an apparent-model for the Trump executive. Debating from an ethical standpoint is confined to another competitive category, the “Lincoln-Douglas debate”. Adam recognises the socio-political repercussions of this division, “a fearful symmetry between the ideological compartmentalisation of high school debate and what passed for the national political discourse.” Commerce, corporations, and social media “spread” Americans every day; while politicians go on “speaking slowly, slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.”
Does The Topeka School offer any answers to all these empty words, this “crisis of content and form”? Adam’s father, Jonathon, is also a psychologist. As part of his research, he records people repeating a passage of prose they are listening to through headphones, so that they cannot hear what they were saying. He incrementally increases the speed of the audio, and finds that gradually the repetitions become complete nonsense, though the participants still think they are coherently reproducing the passage. He is “destroying human language to reveal the river of nonsense coursing just beneath its ‘good, sounds rules’”. He choses a passage from a driving manual:
When you have looked at a shiny, new automobile, have you ever stopped to think that, through all the countless thousands of generations that preceded this century, not even the most powerful kings on earth could have owned one like it? … It took those thousands of generations of technical progress, each building on the achievements of those who lived before.
The Topeka School disregards this narrative of progress, the “shiny, new automobile” of modernity. It exhibits no such linearity, collapsing formal temporalities (“this is 1909; this is 1983; this is the early spring of 1997 seen from 2019”), and repurposing snatches of imagery from each character’s memories, regardless of narrative perspective. At one point, Jonathon recalls a video he shot as a teenager of his mother riding a horse. Towards the end of the reel, a teenager enters the frame. Jonathon realises it is him. Who, then, is holding the camera? It reminds us that no one perspective is completely stable: “regimes of meaning collapse”.
When the good, sound rules of modernity are queried, there are flashes of hope. Jonathon describes a painting in the Met, Duccio’s Madonna and Child. The bottom of the frame is damaged by candle flame. The damage reminds him of the painting’s original significance: it invokes a darkened place of worship, a lit candle briefly showing up the reverential depiction. It shows “traces of an older medium of illumination, the shadow of devotion.” It informs a telling moment in the novel. Jonathon is in a hotel, about to commit adultery with Jane’s best friend; a decade later, but told at the same time, Adam is on the other end of a telephone call from New York. He tells his parents that his girlfriend has suddenly broken up with him. He is utterly distraught, “on the border of collapse.” Jonathon suddenly leaves his hotel room, and gets into the lift, to return to Jane and Adam; meanwhile, Jane manages to temporarily calm Adam down. “Jane had talked us down”. It is a moment of language informed by humanity; an older medium of devotion.
In 2012, the 83-year-old Reverend Fred Phelps, stepped out on to the front doorstep of the Phelps’s compound. The house opposite had been bought by a non-profit, and painted in the colours of the LGBT+ rainbow. Phelps called out towards the building: “You’re good people!” He was expelled from the Westboro Baptist Church shortly afterwards, soon died, and is buried in an unmarked grave. The Topeka School ends with Adam and his family taking part in a demonstration for immigrant children: “I forced myself to participate, to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again, in the middle of the spread.”