Though Ben Lerner probably wouldn’t put it this way, his new novel, The Topeka School, is a story about what happens when a Jewish intellectual gets born in the wrong place. Today, Lerner lives in New York City, where being a Jewish intellectual is, if not exactly common, at least a recognized cultural type. But he was born in 1979 in Topeka, Kansas, a state whose total Jewish population is about 15,000. The options available to a teenage boy in that time and place did not include poet or novelist, the callings Lerner would go on to pursue with conspicuous brilliance.
Rather, Lerner suggests, what he learned in the school that was the American Midwest was how to be a man, in the narrowest, most noxious sense of the word. And the problem of masculinity—how to define it, achieve it, control it—is the central theme of The Topeka School. Lerner does not address this issue in explicitly Jewish terms, though it places him in a long line of masculinity-obsessed Jewish writers that includes Isaac Babel and Philip Roth. For Lerner, rather, masculinity is an American dilemma, one that the country has never managed to figure out. “America is adolescence without end,” says Klaus, a psychologist and Holocaust survivor who serves as something like the novel’s voice of conscience. “Boys will be boys … and spoiled boys will be spoiled boys … and the violence will recur periodically—like cicadas.”
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