Tag: Kansas

Review 2470: The Topeka School

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It’s unfortunate for me that Ben Lerner’s books seem to be devoted mostly to exploring his own psyche, as evidenced by his main character’s biographical details matching his own, because I’m not much interested in his psyche. Sadly, his books keep ending up on the shortlists of the projects I’m pursuing. This one is from the shortlist for the 2020 Pulitzer prize.

In The Topeka School, we encounter Adam Gordon, the protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station. In this novel, he is sometimes older, sometimes younger than in the other, but the bulk of the novel is set in 1997, when Adam is a senior in high school.

Adam is the son of two psychoanalysts who work at the Foundation, a prestigious psychiatric hospital. His mother Jane has become famous by publishing a popular book about the relationships between men and women, and his father Jonathan works mostly with disturbed teenage boys. Adam is navigating relationships with friends, sex with his girlfriend Amber, and preparations for debating competitions.

Lerner has a fascination with words, and words play an important part in the novel. For example, Adam’s high school group includes a boy named Darren he’s grown up with who is behind developmentally. Although the group has been taught not to leave Darren out, inclusion involves submitting him to indignities, like leaving him to walk home from the lake after a party. But mostly, he is called names. Names are what hurts him most.

Aside from being a champion debater, Adam likes to participate in rapping with his friends (I’m probably using the wrong words) even while realizing that he and his upper-middle-class friends have little in common with the people they’re imitating and no true understanding of the idioms they’re using.

We also periodically check in with Darren, who has feelings he can’t express. And there’s Jane, who begins receiving abusive phone calls from men after her book is published. She responds by pretending that the phone connection is poor, so she can’t hear, which eventually makes them hang up.

One of the funniest scenes in the book is the first one, where Adam is in a boat with his girlfriend at night. He is pontificating about something only to realize that his girlfriend has left the boat and swum to shore. Later, when he finds her again, she tells a story about sneaking out of the room while her stepfather is talking, and he doesn’t notice that no one is there. Adam does not at this point understand what this story has to do with him.

Then there is a type of debating described in great detail, where the object is to present as many points as possible as fast as possible even if they are ridiculous, because the opponent loses points for missing an argument. And at several points, characters speak gibberish .

All the while, there is a tension going on between Adam’s pro-feminist familial upbringing and the hyper-masculine society he’s lived in as a young man. Unfortunately, although Jane is a great character, she isn’t very important in the novel. Nor are the other women. Only Adam is important.

The novel explores the past of the family and how it affects the present, using Jonathan, Jane, and Adam as narrators. But really, almost all of it is about Adam.

Related Posts

Leaving the Atocha Station

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Straight Man

Day 632: The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

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Cover for The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie NewtonBest Book of the Week!
Just by coincidence, it seems, I have read several books in the last few years dealing with the wars in Kansas over whether it would be a free state or not. Bleeding Kansas by Sara Paretsky was the first book I read on the subject and the least well done, not providing much background for readers who don’t know a lot about the subject. The next book I read was Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, much more poetic but concerned mostly with a son’s reaction to his minister father’s participation in the bloodshed. The Good Lord Bird provides more of a comic flavor to the time, but it concentrates on a portrait of John Brown. I just finished Jane Smiley’s The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, which provides the most background to the issues and a more vivid picture of the times.

Lidie Harkness is a tall, plain young woman who has spent most of her time avoiding her traditional duties and instead rides, hunts, and swims with her 12-year-old cousin Frank near their home in Quincy, Illinois. She is the only child of her very old father’s second wife, and her sisters are much older. When her father dies, she knows her sisters are at a loss for what to do with her and eager to get her off their hands.

She meets Thomas Newton, a New England abolitionist on his way to join friends in Lawrence, Kansas. He seems struck by the stories Frank tells him of Lidie’s outdoor abilities, and it is not long before they are married and on their way down the Mississippi.

Flyers are plastered all over Lidie’s brother-in-law’s store promising a settled paradise in Kansas, but the reality is much more frantic and primitive. Lidie and Thomas find themselvs in a bustling but rustic town and are soon trying to build a homestead from a rough 12 x 12 cabin. Of concern, though, are all the rumors about the political situation and the outbursts of violence against the mostly free-state settlers by groups of pro-slavery Missourians who are trying to force them out.

In this tempestuous climate, Lidie tries to get to know her husband and also to understand just how committed she is to the fight against slavery. The novel depicts its time and location vividly. Lidie’s is an interesting portrait of a young woman attempting to find her own place in the world and decide what she believes about marriage and the issues of her time.

Day 281: Gilead

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Cover for GileadBest Book of the Week!
Gilead is the novel that precedes Marilynne Robinson’s Home, although it is set in the same time frame and covers some of the same territory. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

John Ames is an elderly Congregationalist minister in 1956 who believes he is dying. He has a much younger wife and young son, a surprising blessing in his old age. The novel is in the form of a diary addressed to his son in the expectation that he will not live long enough to personally pass on his family history and advice.

Ames lives in Gilead, a small Iowa town on the prairie near the border with Kansas. The town was founded by abolitionists during the Free State wars in Kansas as a refuge for slaves and fighters the likes of John Brown. Ames’ grandfather, also a minister of the warrior-for-God ilk, had visions of God and once preached a sermon in a bloody shirt with a gun in his belt. With that upbringing, his son was naturally a pacifist, who left the church for awhile after that sermon to worship with the Quakers. One of Ames’ most powerful memories is of the journey he made with his father to Kansas, in terrible conditions, to retrieve the body of his grandfather, who had returned there.

Although Gilead is certainly about the history of the town–the wars, the Depression, the Dust Bowl years–it is more about the relationship between fathers and sons, both from the secular and religious points of view. Not only does it explore the relationships within Ames’ own family, but it also looks at that between Ames and the son of his best friend the Presbyterian minister–Ames’ surrogate son–John Ames Boughton.

The story of John Ames Boughton is the one more thoroughly explored in the sequel Home, although interestingly enough, Gilead tells Boughton’s story more explicitly, while Home, narrated by Boughton’s sister Glory, only hints at some of the facts.

The novel, a celebration of life and faith, is beautifully written and full of ideas to ponder. That being said, as I do not particularly have a religious background or bent, I did not fully understand some of the narrator’s ideas and preoccupations. I found Home, although told from the point of view of the same goodness and piety, a more accessible novel than Gilead.