Blogs by David A. Schwinghammer
The Topeka School
2/24/2020 11:08:29 AM
Adam Gordon battles male stereotypes as an elite student.
THE TOPEKA SCHOOL is an unusual novel, very hard to read. It's about the Gordon family, a rather elite group, consisting of two therapists, one of whom is a published feminist. Their son Adam, is the main character.
There are several points of view: Adam, his father Jonathan, his mother Jane, and Darren Eberheart, who's a bit slow, but the elite families insist that Adam and his friends include Darren in their activities. These kids don't really consider Darren an equal and they go so far as to leave him at a party six hours from Topeka. There's a predictable blow-up at another party later. The adults never considered how alcohol might impact this relationship.
Adam is an expert policy debater and the best extemporaneous speaker in the country, maybe the best ever. When I was a speech coach, this was my favorite category. The speaker has forty-five minutes to prepare a five to seven minute speech, including research which he/she has done before the competition. He/she can pick from three domestic or three international questions. The good ones don't use a notecard on which they may have fifty words. Symbols count as words. The problem with this activity is that competitors are sometimes considered dorks or nerds by the other kids. Adam is quite concerned about his masculinity, pumps iron regularly and picks fights with other teens who question it.
For those not in the know, Topeka is home base for Fred Phelps and his family of homophobic mouth breathers. Fred is now dead, but the rest of the family shows up at funerals and liberal presentations to rain down cat calls on them, mostly obscenities. They even appear at Veterans' funerals. Jane is one of their principal targets. They refer to her as “The Brain”.
Author Ben Lerner eschews the traditional plot. He gets going in one direction, and the most you'll get is ten pages, before he changes focus. About the only suspense is whether Adam will win the national championship in Forensic extemporaneous speaking at the national tournament in Minneapolis. He is really nervous, so nervous he asks his mother for a valium. And she gives him half of one and another one the day of competition. Her husband is livid. You don't give someone else your prescription; she's a doctor of psychology so she should know.
Lerner is very minimalist in style. He doesn't tell you who's speaking. You need to pay attention to references in order to figure it out. Jane might refer to her husband or Adam. The biggest jump is at the end, which occurs twenty years after the main part of the book and includes another masculine confrontation.
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