View from the Couch: Success, “The Topeka School,” and “A Fan’s Notes”
America’s down, but books are up. Some say America’s never been this down. When they say that to me, I say nothing. I just point up, to the books. Then I point out, to the literary culture. Look at these streets. Look at the coffeehouses, rimming these streets. Fourteen on the north side of Clement alone. The south side? Eleven—two more next week. You can barely see the street for so many coffeehouses, plus the stream—only in, never out—of smart clientele. We stream ourselves in a pack through the streets to our coffeehouse, Jesse and Bailey and Sidney and Kelly and Casey and I, and Topper and Kit, at maximum speed, between and along other coffeehouses. They have other packs, in those coffeehouses. Our coffeehouse too is about to be packed. We pack it every evening of the week. We’d pack it all day if it weren’t occupied before by the daytime packs, with nighttime jobs. We just don’t mix.
Walk down Clement Street, if you can. Stop in a coffeehouse, if you fit through the door. You fit? Think again. You fit in the door. Odds you fit inside are slim. There’s too much talk, and the talk’s all too wide. Enthusiasms crowd each other to the windows, where they press their identical faces to the glass. Small lungs extrude from oversized mouths. Ptsch! Ptsch! This is Valhalla! The wars have been won by litterateurs. Good luck getting around those heaps. You don’t have the pedigree. Everything smells like artisanal coffee. Step aside. Peyton and Frances and Zohar and I cartwheel in through the doorway. We make a jam. Luckily we’re dislodged seconds later by Deepal, Cameron, and Charlie, who cartwheel into our jam from the street.
Inside, I have friends who argue with me. Topper argues, and Frances argues. I say, “The literary culture is healthy!” We violently agree. “It’s great!” “It is!” “It’s never been better!” Everyone is so intelligent, and we are all exquisitely credentialed. An adjunct professor sings “Bella Ciao” in the corner, which, in its way, is further assent. You at least have to credit the culture’s credentials. I credit them, gustily. We throw back brews. We throw back some more. We throw back several. The vapors are rising above the enthusiasms. We take their cue. We rise with the vapors. Topper and Stevie and Frances and I—Riley shouts, “Stevie’s here!”—we stand on our chairs to insufflate our natural vapors, which stimulate thought, and new enthusiasms. Vapors are up, so thoughts are up. “It’s great!” “It is!” “It’s never been better!” I close my eyes. I cherish our vapors. I cherish the sound, from one table over, of my friends’ explaining Trump. They have him tonight. They had him last night. Every night, they get Trump. It’s uncanny. I cherish the uncanniness of my friends and our culture. You’ve got to have coffee weekly, or more, to quiet the spleen. Topper and Stevie and Frances and I drink several coffees a night. Our ideas race higher to keep pace with our vapors. Cameron shouts, “We aren’t dumb or banal! We live in the future!” Deepal shouts, “We live in the future!” Sidney shouts, “We live in the future!” I shout the same. Parker shouts, “The dream of true nonviolence and total integration is not much further along!” “The future! The future!” That has to be Topper. The coffee is brown. I catch my reflection in a saucer. My teeth have turned the coffee brown! And it’s true that the coffee is brown, like my teeth. We close the door, once Sasha’s inside. We shut out the night.
The climate worries us, sometimes, and I get melancholic. But it’s all to the good of literature.
Someone reopens the door from outside! Ilham, Inge, and Joe are forced to somersault into the cold, by the pressure. So long Ilham, Inge, and Joe. A man’s frame fills the doorframe, in their stead. It’s near cold enough to wear a scarf, but it’s warm inside. He does not enter. The man is wearing a scarf already. The wind whips the ends of the scarf up and off his neck. He says, “I just got in from Rhode Island, just now.” We slip our enthusiasms beneath our saucers. I listen.
The man pronounces confidentially, but resonantly, so that anybody might hear him:
“I just got here from Providence.”
Meaningful looks and whispers are exchanged by Charlie and Cameron, Sasha and Stevie. Zohar and Kit rush hands to their mouths. “Providence, Providence, Providence, Providence,” I hear from the tables. Everyone knows what Providence means. Everyone knows what lies in Providence. We affect not knowing. We affect an impassivity. For “Providence” belies another truth. The man is a celebrated writer.
He bows in the doorway. He holds this bow long enough to suggest he bends at the precipice of sublime literary performance.
He unbows, and he begins to speak. The tone is vatic. The diction too. He raises both arms and opens them out. His wrists are pressed to the side jambs. “Darren,” he whispers, “pictured shattering the mirror with his metal chair.” We look at the seats of our chairs, in unison. We part our thighs, to see our seats. The coffeehouse does not have any mirrors. When we look back up at the celebrated writer, we’ve already missed a few paragraphs. He’s fast. His speech has hastened and continues to hasten. The hastening hastens! His whisper crescendoes to a shout, almost. Soon we can only pick up snatches: “Nescafé, Lipton, Sweet’n Low… UUUHH! …optical assessment of self-guided missiles… UUUUUHH! …unintelligible if shaped noise… UH! …Chlorpromazine and electroshock!” Faster and faster the writer mummers, while hewing close to an intricate rhythm hindered only by breath. “UUHH! UUHH!” To be fair it’s not clear if he’s breathing or dying. The ends of the scarf start to rise. “UUUHH!” His eyebrows start to rise with it. “UUUHH!” The scarf abandons the scribbler’s neck, and the eyebrows rocket over his hairline. They leave his head. “UUUHH! UUUHH!” He hovers. Despite the cold, he sweats like a kid with a sweating disease, only—the sweat falls up. It jets from his face in heavy globules, up toward the eyebrows that hover above him.
“King! King! King! King! King! King! King!” We are shouting. We clink our coffee cups on the tabletops’ varnish.
Amid this gaiety, I take stock of my feeling. I find my feelings have gotten funny. What’s he saying, the celebrated writer? What does it mean, the writer’s performance? Is the celebrated writer explicating Trump? I hope he will explicate Trump to us. What good is the writer, if he doesn’t get Trump?
How did I get here, inside this coffeehouse? I wonder at that. How did I get inside?
I wonder, and imagine myself as coffee in a broken cup. I slide down the chair to the parquet floor. It’s all in the knees, and also the spine. Once on my knees, I throw forth my torso and armycrawl across dead enthusiasms. Their tracheae recall to me jungle gyms. I shimmy to the beat of the cups on the tables. I haul across corpses and corpses manqué, and across Kai and Dijon’s feet, and over the sill, and under the soles of the writer’s levitating Chelsea boots.
He was cool, at least, the celebrated writer. And it felt good, to crawl under the boots, while he talked. It felt right, and I wanted to stay.
I lay there a minute. I thought about Providence, Rhode Island, and a college there. I thought about the celebrated writer’s novel The Topeka School, from 2019.
But the good times cannot roll forever. There’s friction. I had work to do. Outside the coffeehouse, I stood up straight and brushed the snow from the sleeves of my coat. Would you know what he meant if the reviewer said that he left the coffeehouse glummer than before, that books had begun to feel less up? I did not know where to point, anymore. The street held neither packs nor streams. It was San Francisco’s first real snow since 1976.
There is a man on Clement who shouts at passersby, who often makes camp by the trashbin outside the bookshop. (We have a few such men. This one is “Gordie.”) That night he posed an interesting question: “How many dead are you floating on?” He likes to pose questions to no one at all. He shouted a few times more. “How many dead are you floating on now?” I stopped to speak with him, that night. I asked him what he thought of The Topeka School. When he did not respond, I mentioned the reviews. I noted all their enthusiasms.
“Ha! Reviews,” Gordie scoffed.
“Ben Lerner calls it the genealogy of a voice.”
“Ha! I’ll say.”
I mulled his point. I asked, “Does the book explain Trump?”
He laughed at me, or he laughed at Trump. He preferred to discuss Dennis Rodman. So we talked Dennis Rodman. I looked for a friendly way out. I turned around and lifted the canvas off the bookshop’s discount cart, behind me. Paydirt! The Topeka School, $1.98. The cosmos had listened. I bid farewell to my friend, and I stole it. “Kid! Hey! Snag one for me!” He pointed to A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley, also on the cart. “Afterward, hey—you and I swap!”
He winked. I winked. I walked back to my apartment. I spent the night reading, for once.
I foreswore all coffee. I made dense notes. I felt I needed to get it, at last.
•
Here’s how it starts. Adam Gordon, the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station, and maybe the narrator of 10:04, reappears as a senior at Topeka High, observed from the late 2010s. In the future Adam is a successful poet who fulfills and elaborates on his young self’s hope of recounting the novel’s events “from a vaguely imagined East Coast city where his experiences in Topeka could be recounted only with great irony.” The city is New York. Adam’s parents, like Ben Lerner’s parents in the 1990s, are psychologists at the “Foundation,” a substitute for the Menninger Clinic. The biggest problem in Topeka is its men, none of whom seem alright. (Two exceptions: the novel’s only gay man, and a man who survived the Holocaust in a chicken coop.) In 1996, Adam is an aspiring man, and he retrospectively charts a course of machista fumbling through his youth until his warm heart, loving parents, and poetic virtuosity make him a pretty good dad in Brooklyn.
It is the genealogy of a voice, or at least a style. Interspersed with the Adam chapters are monologues from the perspective of the parents, Jane and Jonathan Gordon, who exert a softening influence on Adam. His more extreme or anomalous qualities derive from competitive speech and debate—policy debate (CX), Lincoln-Douglas debate (LD), and extempore speaking (extemp). Adam masters extemp and wins its national championship, but he has a flair for all three. Each format marks his incipient personal style, and to get the style, you have to get the texture of high-school speech and debate. CX, the most prestigious, is characterized by a hyperfast form of reading aloud called “spreading,” which is nearer to shouting than speech. It approaches glossolalia, snippets of argument punctuated by a willed kind of death rattle—half hiccup and half shriek. The spreader’s motive is to introduce so many arguments that the opponent, who also spreads, will not have time to respond. An unanswered argument is considered “dropped” and therefore conceded, regardless of quality. Adam explains that LD was founded in response to the development of spreading in CX. Instead of policy differences, debaters would address ethical problems on a glib philosophical basis, and it was hoped they would address them slowly. A single moral “value” is proposed to evaluate a resolution, and the value’s fulfillment is measured by a corresponding “value criterion.” At nationals in 2019, the affirmative speaker in the final round proposed a value of “justice,” to be measured in terms of “mitigating structural oppression.” The negative speaker liked justice too, but believed it was better achieved via “maximizing human rights.”
Adam uses CX and LD as metaphors, or more than metaphors, for two distinct but intertwined threads in American public life: “Even before the twenty-four-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.” Spreading maps to a form of hollow political speech laced with headlines, numbers, and jargon—the op-ed page. With its thoughtless appeals to Locke and its reductio ad Hitlerums, LD maps to the other political speech—the campaign trail, television news.
Extemp, Adam’s forte, has affinities with both. You receive a choice of three questions and half an hour to dig through a box of recent issues of The Economist. These evidence files, which extempers bring to tournaments, supply the basis for their arguments. After thirty minutes, you have seven more minutes to deliver a speech, without recourse to your notes. The most successful extempers steal the most apparently persuasive techniques of both LDers and CXers. They do anecdotes, mime likeability, and sometimes actually mime—popping a bubble, holding a lectern. Every rhetorical pseudo-flourish is chased with a shot of facts. Every platitude gets a citation, whether fictional or from The Economist. The delivery is native to LD, and the presentation of evidence reflects the prestige and reach of CX. Adam learns the style of extemp from a national champion, Evanson, who can “spread him while speaking at conversational speed.” In one-on-ones after school, Evanson teaches Adam how to win at debate, but also how to smuggle the spread into his everyday life.
Learning to spread is learning to build a plausible lattice, into which a clever talker can slot any words and any idea. To learn to spread is to learn to win on a field of anyone’s choosing, and for Adam spreading is rapture. While spreading he feels his words “dissolve into pure form,” into flat, rhythmic, counterfeit fluencies, “like a speech was delivering him.” He compares it to writing poetry. Evanson’s voice feels disturbingly close to his own, he claims, but he finds a way out. He believes that Evanson, a future right-wing consultant, plays for the wrong side of history.
As with The Topeka School’s predecessors, narrative tension is not the attraction. Winning nationals is a sure thing from the start. (He came in second the year before. “The general consensus: he was robbed.”) The point is the rigor of Lerner’s ventriloquism, an almost metered imitation of himself that falters only by design. He’s a rhythm savant. His sentences are minor technical marvels that can fit the detritus of shoptalk, brand names, and center-left shibboleths while maintaining the complex appeal of their cadence. They are imposing but easy to parse. “It was good,” he writes, in a typical musing on teenage romance,
to be inflicting optional damage on your bright pink lungs; it was good to be two young people tasting of Lancôme and Philip Morris, synthetic pheromones and carcinogens, to be at the point of their most intimate contact, their most interchangeable, corporate persons; clichés, types.
The voice is crutch, ceiling, and selling point. Its virtuosity is exculpatory, but it can only play itself. As soon as it returns to the past and takes a new name, the voice can succeed as genealogy only. Imitating Jane and Jonathan induces strain, unless we buy that the voice belongs to them before Adam. Before we meet them, the voice’s worst tendencies read sui generis, but the tics begin with Mom and Dad, or can be pinned on Mom and Dad.
For Jane and Adam especially, adjectives and adverbs tend toward emptiness. Jane recalls an “impossibly difficult question”; she describes her mother as “impossibly frugal.” Adam remembers his grandfather’s feet “looked impossibly small,” and some trees in a miniature train set look “impossibly detailed.” Clouds are “unusually dark,” and a November evening on the lake is “unusually warm.” Twenty years later, Adam calls a warm November “unseasonable,” reprising a favorite from 10:04, in which “unseasonable” and “unseasonably” appear at least eight times. Sexists are “outrageously” sexist and “outrageously” sexist again. As empty descriptors can fill out a line of bad poetry, so can they finish a line of prose that doesn’t quite scan. All the most obnoxious qualities in the family’s speech, or Lerner’s writing, work to this effect. Where an independent clause can’t stand alone for metrical reasons, the Gordons replace a period with a comma and repeat themselves—same image, new phrase.
Their gestures toward orality have a similar effect. They sound like a student’s effort to pad an essay’s word count, or a debater’s appeal to a judge. The use and abuse of technical language sounds more academic than intellectual. Jonathan likes to “process,” or to talk about his feelings. Jane explains the value of kids’ answering phones for their parents as “periodic real-time vocal contact with an extended community.” These euphemisms are most often invoked to obscure impolite language, understood broadly—sexual, emotional, and medical. In 10:04, sex was “coition,” and tears turned to “lacrimal events.” Asia became “the world’s most populous continent” when it made a cameo in hardcore porn. In The Topeka School—go back, see above. Lung cancer and emphysema are displaced to the safer “optional damage.” Comic situations become unfunny, and giving head becomes “cunnilingus.”
He is a therapist who has learned from his parents to talk the talk of history’s winners and a spreader who talks too fast to be heard, but if you cup your ears and catch a few words, you will only catch the correct ones. In a novel, this fealty to etiquette causes problems. In a passage asserting the privilege of the white, able-bodied “man-child,” Adam explains, “If he were a woman or a racialized or otherwise othered body, he would be in immediate mortal danger from sexual predators and police.” No doubt, only—these “bodies” arrive soon after an unforgettable scene in which Adam, as a kid, wraps his penis in chewing gum, and he calls his penis his “body.” What is a woman, if she is a body? The text cuts one way, and its author, who has business and social obligations, cuts the other. Later Adam calls himself a “cracker,” both as a teen and as a dad. What does that mean for the rich, Ivy-bound child of East Coast therapists? And what does it mean for a professor in Brooklyn whose books bring a “strong six-figure” advance—after his Lannan, after his Fulbright, after two degrees from Brown? “Cracker” is a class-based slur, “an insulting and contemptuous term for a poor, white, usually Southern person.” So says Merriam-Webster. Do bodies in Brooklyn think Kansas is the South? Ritual self-flagellation is easier when you have an available whipping boy. It’s easiest when he cannot afford your book.
That’s Adam, anyway. What about Ben? The mind behind the voice is insulated twice. The writer is Adam, not Ben Lerner, even when he speaks for his parents, yet he lifts nearly all verifiable details straight from Lerner’s life. Unlike his author, Adam is an only child, a difference apparent from the book’s dedication to “my brother, Matt,” but the evident fictionality of a few names, characters, events, and lacunae plays to his advantage. Distance from the real is expertly calibrated. Adam’s missteps are plausibly fictions, not confessions, but anything easy, hackneyed, or neat is excused as plausibly true. Hey, man—isn’t life hackneyed? He’s built a machine for shifting liability, even down at the sentence level. In a conversation held on his publicity tour, Lerner disavowed “the virtuosic inhabitation of another voice.” Maggie Nelson told him he got “pretty close,” but he insisted he intended otherwise: “I was more interested in the drama of the adult son undertaking the effort to imagine the voices of the parents, and there being tears in those voices, glitches.” If you think Jane and Jonathan sound too much like Adam: first, they don’t; second, they’re related; third, they do, that’s the point! Where do these instincts originate? Adam tells us that Evanson perfected the “plausibly deniable outrage.”
It’s a problem for the critic. In third the voice flickers between Ben, old Adam, and young Adam, sometimes artfully á la Faulkner, and sometimes as cover for a plausibly deniable jerkoff. When he writes that coaches and debaters across the country are discussing whether he is “the best extemporaneous speaker in the history of debate,” you hear the voice of a cocksure teenager, but it’s hard to forget that Lerner was a national champion, too. Hm. With that in mind, try this on:
He could hardly have been the only boy who “ate pussy” in Topeka, but he might have been the only kid in the class of ’97 who read up on techniques, consulted the famous sexpert when she passed through town, who solicited frank feedback from his partner in the act. (The talk itself, after her initial shyness, seemed to affect Amber almost as much as physical contact.)
Note the scare quotes—who’s talking now? Old Adam believes himself the most generous teenaged lover in Topeka, but I suspect Lerner does too, looking back. I’ll bite that bullet if I must. Amid the toxic masculinity, against his partaking in the training, he implies, of the new American Right, Adam comes off a bit sharper, better—a little more sensitive than his peers.
Occasional missteps are unavoidable, but they are only missteps. If you reject the novel’s terms and mistake Adam for Lerner, he has already covered his flank. In Brooklyn in the end, he knocks another dad’s phone from his hand, albeit in defense of his daughters. The horror! Redemption is swift. The final scene shows his learning to listen by joining the kitsch of a human mic at a protest against the excesses of ICE. Outside the text, Lerner has argued that Adam’s arc doesn’t end in “triumph,” that he hasn’t exorcised the old bad instincts. But to announce the work is all done would be gauche. Real “triumph,” against the old triumph, is doing the work forever, knowing how to genuflect without slipping off the ladder. Christian Lorentzen has written about the conquest of American letters by careerists, but the careerist logic of The Topeka School runs especially deep. The form is careerist, and the voice is careerist.
Adam has one brave moment that redounds to his credit and not to his benefit. In the LD quarterfinals of the national tournament, he is spread by a Texan, and he refuses the Texan’s terms. He devotes the remainder of his time to an argument against the spread itself. His genuinely kind, genuinely intelligent mother is proud, and he loses the round 4-1. The next day, he wins extemp. His mother can see that his “gait is not his own, that he’s performing uprightness, aping naturalness, projecting calm while flexing.” A lesson is learned.
Here’s where they end, all these debaters. The real Evanson went to Williams, not Harvard, but the rest of his story in The Topeka School is true. He worked for Sam Brownback, who fucked over Kansas through an audacious, catastrophic experiment in cost-cutting. The real boy who beat Adam at nationals took a similar path, but in the other direction. This doesn’t make the book. He got first in LD in 1997, and became a progressive class-action lawyer after a stint as a Guantanamo prosecutor. Do these changes and omissions serve an aesthetic purpose, or do they serve another? The “real” Adam turned out the best. His senior year, he was one of eleven students in the country to qualify for a fourth national tournament. In LD, he came in sixth. In International Extemp, he came in first, after getting tenth in 1995 and second in 1996. Later he became a MacArthur Genius and a famous poet and novelist.
“Some people say this, I’m sure, about my writing,” he would say much later about literature, “but I think there’s a lot of writing now that’s just for all the right things, and against all the wrong things.” The trouble is telling between right and wrong. It’s all in your read of the room.
Skimming my notes, I was starting to worry. I still didn’t understand Trump.
•
An absence looms. It’s unruly. It doesn’t make the debate team. I tried to squint at the margins.
When Adam is a kindergartener, he likes to go to “Dillon’s” for groceries with Jane. One day she sends him for milk and, five minutes later, finds him crying alone, down the wrong aisle. “There are men behind the walls,” he says, “there are men back there hiding in the walls laughing at me and trying to grab me.” Jane instantly asks who touched him because, we learn, she was sexually abused by her father. When she understands that nothing has happened to Adam, that the dairy case is stocked from the back, she explains about storerooms. What Adam has heard and seen are the stockers. He has nightmares about these men for months. His parents, being therapists, ruminate. How to account for Adam’s fear? Jane connects his fixation with “the toxic masculinity swirling around.” For her another factor is the connection to milk, its resemblance to “the nourishment [she] once gave [him] from the breast.” Jonathan worries that Adam fears his father is too effeminate to protect him from Topeka’s other men who, to Jonathan, resemble the cowboys of tobacco ads. Their friend Klaus, the Holocaust survivor, thinks Adam has recognized alienation of labor—troubling at any age, horrific at six. But Jane rejects that. Old Left out, New Left in! With time, Adam forgets the stockers. It’s easy because he never sees them.
The most important division in The Topeka School cleaves those who speak and those who cannot. He mostly channels Jane and Jonathan, but he does some Klaus, some Evanson, and a couple pages of his high-school girlfriend. The last two voices are represented least. They are also the most aesthetically interesting. No one else demands new rhythms. Adam might treat them fairly—who knows?—but not with reverence. It makes some difference. Evanson gives him debate advice in a thrilling, amoral staccato, sharp like Alec Baldwin’s character at the start of Glengarry Glen Ross. Other characters’ voices appear in italics or quotation marks. Spreading appears in italics, and Bob Dole talks in quotes. The phrase “I warned you, motherfucker” appears once in each. Grandpa, the abuser, is reduced to catatonia with age, but a transcript of his windbaggy speech is reproduced and italicized. A discourse from Klaus in a daydream gets italics, but dream-Klaus is talking Nazi cosmology, so it all adds.
Between chapters, Adam follows someone else in italics, his former classmate Darren, whose life seems designed to account for his later support for Trump and to dismiss his type. He is a high-school dropout. His diabetic mother has raised him alone since his schizophrenic father died in a car accident. He is possibly schizophrenic himself, and he is almost definitely mentally disabled. Jonathan is his therapist, but Darren is not much for talking. As Jonathan says of another young patient, “if he could speak, he wouldn’t have symptoms.” He gets about thirty pages in all. The popular seniors adopt him, as cool kids sometimes belatedly do—partly for atonement, partly for fun—and, at a party in a cool kid’s basement, a boy gives Darren meth. He throws a cueball at a girl’s face. Her jaw is broken, her speech disfigured.
It’s Adam’s favored line of argument, reminiscent of Freud’s fake case studies. Personal history is flattened and folded into stories that conform to pat models of human behavior. In a glaring instance, Jonathan’s father steps outside his marriage with his wife’s best friend, so it follows that Jonathan must do the same. Similar principles can be applied to political histories. Bob Dole oversees the award ceremony at a debate tournament, which is significant because, we are told, he is the only former presidential nominee to attend the Republican convention in 2016. Thus debate makes the Trumpist right. Personal history, national history—it can all be reduced. Jonathan’s adaptation of a Hesse story becomes a device for placing the writing of In Search of Lost Time next to, on the page, the opening of Trump Tower. The Topeka School begins with a similar reduction—a prophecy for Darren seen from the future, after it’s already fulfilled:
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.
Darren is Adam’s preterite double, as damned from the start as Adam is bound for success. Darren’s mom is a nurse who cares for Adam after a concussion, and Adam’s dad is a PhD who treats Darren’s emotional problems. His “little mimic spasms,” facial tics, suggest the mimic intrusions of other voices in Adam’s. The doubling is made more explicit in little mimic spasms of language. Long after the cue ball, when Adam has kids and publicity tours, his path crosses Darren’s again in Topeka. One has become the conquering hero, home to read his poetry, and the other has joined the Westboro Baptist Church. Darren waits outside Adam’s reading to heckle with his congregation. He holds a sign, its message unspecified, and otherwise waits in silence. The closest he comes to speaking for himself is a Make America Great Again cap. We go back to the future and sew up the past. On the other side of thirty pages of near illiteracy, maybe psychosis, waits the metonymic Trump supporter.
Trump is what happens when therapy fails, but the problem is not therapy. The cue ball was there all along, was it not? Adam refers to a therapeutic culture that could not take Darren “into the medicalized pastoral of in-treatment (who would pay?) or reconcile him with clinical hours to the larger world,” which suggests a clean division of men into those who might improve by therapy and those too damaged to profit—or too poor. It’s a dynamic familiar to flyover emigrants everywhere, who think the same or have friends who do. You get out of Kansas, or stay home and rot. You protest ICE, or soldiers’ funerals. You have an acceptable mental illness (anxiety), or metamorphose into an offensive hat (learning disabilities, schizophrenia, precarity). What if what’s wrong with America is basically stranger than Darren? What if it’s not pathological?
Lerner has the tools to probe this strangeness, and he sometimes turns them on himself and nears genuine comedy. You think you might catch a gleam of Beckett or, farther on, Donald Antrim’s antic spirit. Listen to Adam contemplate resolving an argument between his parents:
Maybe he could wrap his body in chewing gum and walk into their room, “It just fell out of my mouth,” distract them. Maybe put on his debate suit and reason with them, adjudicate questions of policy and value. He decided he’d go to the bathroom, make a lot of noise in the hall.
Picture Molloy playing at extemp and wearing the ill-fitting suit. But propriety limits comedy, and social prejudice works to the same. In the first chapter, Adam gets lost in a Topeka suburb because he cannot distinguish between houses. He enters the wrong home and realizes too late. It speaks to a failure to see. Nothing happens in the houses, and no one speaks behind the walls. Our only convincing, specific portraits are of two generations’ distinct approaches to ruling-class conformity—speaking correctly, moving correctly, fumbling down the established paths—without Adam’s recognizing or attempting to transmit their weirdness. Only the workshopped signals and clichés of debate are made strange, which is easy. They already were, but the familiar remains familiar. Farcical nonconformity imposed by personal tragedy is the only alternative because nonconformity is tragic or diseased. Success as frame of reference, prophecy as history, and argument as raison d’être will circumscribe a novel’s possibilities.
In Darren’s longest section, something threatens this rigid form with life. It’s a coded but authentic vulnerability that partly redeems Adam by damning him. He and his friends abandon Darren drunk in a field one night, the “best” of Darren’s life, and the man-child, after checking that his friends have left him his knife, tries to beat his way home. It goes badly, but Adam tosses him a crumb. For a day he is neither all illness nor all MAGA. He is compared to the poet John Clare, whose account of running home from an asylum Adam quotes, then meaningfully alters. Where Clare is helped on his way and makes it eighty miles, Darren is ignored or rejected until he calls his mother collect. But the instinct or vision is there. He almost becomes a poet—a hint of sensibility, none of the tools. Darren believes in the few words he has, that his wishes might come true as spells. He thinks himself responsible for wishing his father’s death, and he slips humiliation telling lies, or tales. Invocation of military jargon and the repetition of brandnames make him, he imagines, a soldier-survivor. His knives are all Bucks, his bike is a Predator, and Darren is a martial artist. If bigots had not coopted him, if classmates had not tortured him, and if he were not slow, the power he senses in language could be worked into powerful language.
Adam peers into Darren’s pathology and reveals a poetic resource that he cannot access directly. On the near side of the doubling, we have tools without sensibility, and Darren’s primal relation to language serves as a veiled confession of Adam’s poverty. In The Hatred of Poetry, a long, revealing, aptly titled essay, Lerner makes a similar confession. “I’m asking you to locate your memory,” he writes,
of language as a creative and destructive force. I have done the reading, and the reading suggests that we always experience this power as withdrawing from us, or we from it—if we didn’t distance from this capacity it would signal our failure to be assimilated in to the actual, adult world, i.e., we would be crazy.
Understand that Darren retains access to this perception of language, which has withdrawn from Adam and Ben. Understand that great writers and great readers also retain access. Some are crazy. Some are unassimilated to the actual, adult world. Understand that the actual, adult world is insane and intolerable. I’m asking you to locate your memory of Pound summoning nymphs, or Borges reviving Martín Fierro to escort him to his death. Oddly for a future poet, young Adam confesses he cannot hear voices in his head. The association of Darren with Clare, the possibility that an undesirable has the talent for seeing and feeling, inaccessible to Adam—despite his triumphs, despite his molding Darren as the perfect loser—must frighten him. What could rescue a poet so lost he cannot hear his effects?
New value and new criterion. Resolved: Language isn’t everything. Evanson has not beaten Adam, because Evanson is wrong about history. Darren has no edge on Adam, because there is no history. (The ball had been there all his life, and it wears a little red cap.) If you cannot speak the beautiful or represent the true, you can always say what is right. Good politics beat bad poetry, and Adam’s are the politics of victory without end—the book’s politics, Lerner’s politics. We are all together in the street, relearning how to be kind to each other, to use our words to participate in a healthy body politic. (Pay no attention to the men behind the walls, the kids in the cage, etc.) If we could only find the words, the pace, the style… In 10:04 the victory was Occupy. We’ve long been winning, as long as we’ve been losing. 10:04 is concerned with climate apocalypse, but apocalypse is deferred by protest, or at least it makes apocalypse feel less bad. Adam or Ben hosts a protester for a meal, a shower, and a cycle of wash. They reflect on communal love together and dismantle toxic masculinity. Protest cracks the window on a social revolution. If it’s kitschy, if it falls short, if we underperform—it all still counts. It feels as good as winning. “I mean, I know it’s not the point of Occupy,” says the protester, because it’s not, “but I’m telling you now I don’t size men up in terms of fights all the time and I don’t act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?”
•
With a heavy heart, a few nights later, I returned to Gordie’s corner. I waited for sundown, then waited longer. I pondered late. I ran down a sidestreet and slipped along walls, down low, between the shadows. It was amply lit, which slowed me down—but Clement at last had emptied, except Gordie. He was perched by his favorite trashbin. When I arrived he did not stir from his high, canvas chair. I stood in front of his chair. He jabbed an open palm in my direction. I read his mind, and I forked The Topeka School over. You can’t dispute Gordie’s terms, but he’s always an honest broker. He passed me Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and wiped both sides of The Topeka School with the sleeves of his olive workshirt.
Then he tossed it in the bin, and turned up his eyes into the fog. He made an odd noise low in his throat. His eyes could have turned left or right, to the same effect, with all this fog. I considered pointing out as much, given what I knew about his neck troubles. The snow had melted and evaporated.
“Hey,” I said. “What was that for?” I pointed toward the bin.
“I was wiping it for prints.”
“No. After that.” The air was still cold, with or without snow.
“There isn’t any after.”
I pondered that.
“You threw it in the trash,” I said.
“So I threw it in the trash! That hardly counts for an after! It neither merits nor tills the earth for an after!” He cackled and winked, or he had an eye problem. He turned his face back down to me. “Yes, I remember,” he said, “I remember when I was a boy and the feuilletons did not abase themselves in praising any person who worked their same narrow plot, or at least the plots were not so cramped. I will not do sociology. Still, it isn’t a crime to wish not to follow a successful writer to Athens, nor to wish not to jet between central European book fairs because, yes, it all feels central to me. It’s true! Nor am I enticed by the minor follies of a Harvard freshman, nor her sophomore loss of virginity, even or especially if she writes like an email newsletter. If you write me a syllabus, hey, I think it neither churlish nor absurd to insist that your level should rise near to that of the peers you choose! I do not care about Iowa. I could maybe care about Iowans. Your PhD does not compel me more than the warmth you feel for your kid, which does not compel me any. No. And beating implausible tragedy is roughly the same as conquest. I reject both. Triumph, triumph! I live badly. Yes, the climate changes. But what about me? I don’t change!”
His eyes glowed bright from somewhere below. His problem could be connected to getting rejected from fellowships, I thought. I chose not to pry.
“Humanities in crisis? Fuck,” he said. “That’s me! It’s me! I am in crisis!”
He did appear to be in crisis, and he needed to pull it together.
I thought I could help. I asked, “Hasn’t it been the same forever?”
“Of course,” he said. He turned and spat in his bin. “I just didn’t have to like it, then.”
I looked at the cover of A Fan’s Notes, which shows blank pages wafting away from a typewriter, out a window.
I asked, “Are we good?”
“Alright,” he said, “We’re good.”
I touched his right hand, to agree. Then I dashed home in the shadows, mostly. I sat on the couch. I remained without coffee. I felt no urge to speak with Casey or Peyton or Deepal—not even Stevie, the brilliant one. I just read Exley. I made fewer notes. Though his book is called a “fictional memoir,” he did not try to defend himself. He used his own name. He struck me as bad at most things, but excellent at fictional memoirs.
I read this fictional memoir and considered a different path for the novel.
A Fan’s Notes is the account of Exley’s “long malaise,” the lost years between his leaving home in Watertown, New York, and finishing the book, back home in his thirties. He often goes home in between. Cumulatively, he spends months, or years, on his mother’s davenport sofa. One chapter’s name would make a fine subtitle: “Journey on a Davenport.” He also journeys to dive bars, asylums and the Polo Grounds. Exley was an alcoholic diagnosed with schizophrenia, among other psychoses. He was born a loser and remained one, by most definitions, through the publication of A Fan’s Notes. Soon thereafter, he was a loser again. Exley claims to be morally repugnant, but he goes easy on the damned. He is a fan of literature—Bellow, Nabokov, Edmund Wilson—and the New York Giants, their running back Frank Gifford especially. They once crossed paths in college. His attachment to the Giants and Gifford is rabid. “I gave myself up to the Giants utterly,” he writes. “The recompense I gained was the feeling of being alive.” He is obsessed, improbably, with fame. He lives in novels, elaborate fantasies, and Sunday football games. When the woman whom he briefly, tragically marries asks about Gifford, he tells her about moving to New York after college, how he
had this awful dream of fame, but that, unlike Gifford—who had possessed the legs and the hands and the agility, the tools of his art—I had come to New York with none of the tools of mine, writing. I told her how I had tried to content myself with reverie, envisioning myself emblazoned across the back of dust jackets. I told her how I had gone each lonely Sunday to the Polo Grounds where Gifford, when I heard the city cheer him, came after a time to represent to me the possible, had sustained for me the illusion that I could escape the bleak anonymity of life.
He tells her about the “hot humiliation of having hoped for too much.” It’s the voice of the double who didn’t pan out and moved away, into his head. This one has the sensibility and—he’s wrong—the tools. The double’s advantage is the view from below.
Exley has a Gogolian knack for politely entering run-of-the-mill American homes and each time leaving with nightmares. They don’t all look the same. Bunny Sue Allorgee, Exley’s counterpart to Amber, lives in a “suburb of a suburb” with her class-conscious mother and father, a failed developer—their development is his failure—with a winking problem and an obsession with their garage’s automatic door. Bunny Sue calls him “Poppy.” Exley works a few days for an undersized door-to-door salesman who tries and fails to peddle aluminum siding. He is a sad, aging inversion of the archetypal Yankee trader. He does standing backflips and will drop, when ordered, to give you a hundred push-ups. Exley spins an anecdote from Boswell about a gentleman shooting cats into a full, dissolute trust-fund adult, whom he names “Bumpy.” He is deranged and fully believable as the cat-hunting terror of Westchester. Exley can enter a middle-class home through a payphone and sketch its ordinary rooms and its madcap lives.
From the underside he writes an America richer and stranger, sadder and funnier, than anywhere accessible from the top looking down. He has nothing left to protect. He has no vital interests. The world is the book, and he is a fan. This is Exley’s epiphany, his learning how to speak: “I understood, and could not bear to understand, that it was my destiny… to sit in the stands with most men and acclaim others. It was my fate, my destiny, my end, to be a fan.” The stands are packed, unlike the field. For the pros they merge in a dull seething mass. The view is distinct from the bleachers, for the fans. Their world is not split between Adams, Darrens, Evansons, and Janes. It is full, and it has range. It does not advertise anyone.
The Topeka School is the careerist novel par excellence. The novel’s future, when the careerists lose, might look more like A Fans’ Notes—less proprioceptive, more widely receptive. The future might be cleaner, smarter, and enlivened by sharper hates than Exley—lighter on its feet, less arbitrary—but it would be dug from the same pit. Onetti in his bed, Dickinson in hers. It would be written from a lived or imagined place of abjection. Truth would be lain aside to serve books and not their authors. The memory of language as a creative and destructive force will be recovered, projected into several futures at once by those who need its creation and destruction.
The future novel resides with the fans. It will not be written from above or outside. Literature belongs to the davenport.