
The Topeka School
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Linari
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Peter Berkrot
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Tristan Wright
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By:
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Ben Lerner
2019 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
2019 NPR Best Book of the Year
2019 National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee
2019 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year
2019 Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year
2019 NYT Outstanding Books of the Year
2019 The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
2020 Folio Prize Shortlist
2019 Washington Post Best Books of the Year
2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year
2019 New York Magazine Best Books of the Year
2020 Pulitzer Prize - Finalist
2019 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
2019 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year
2019 NYPL Book for Reading and Sharing
Named one of the most anticipated fall books by Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Vogue, Vulture, The Observer, Kirkus, Lit Hub, The Millions, The Week, Oprah Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Nylon, Pacific Standard, Publishers Weekly, Slate, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Guardian
From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right.
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart - who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient - into the social scene, to disastrous effect.
Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
Cover photograph from The Wichita Eagle. © 1990 McClatchy. All rights reserved. Used under license. Kansas.com
©2019 Ben Lerner (P)2019 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















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Great novel, narration flawed...
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Droll
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interesting, unique and compelling
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challenging
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Lerner creates characters and settings that feel "real" to me.
I thought the narration was good albeit with a few pronunciation bloopers.
Great Family Drama--And More!
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Sooo gooooood
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I found the complaints about the political views of the characters to be very strange. What did they expect in a novel about East-Coast Jewish psychoanalysts living in Topeka in the era of Fred Phelps & Co.? The characters' politics (notably Jane) and intellectualism (notably Adam) are not strident or intrusive at all. Regarding that complaint: nothing to see here; move on.
Regarding this audiobook: Two of the voice actors are excellent. They read the narration of Jonathan and Jane, the parents of Adam. These voice actors read, no perform, in a very believable manner: they really do sound as intelligent and thoughtful and, at times, conflicted as Adam's parents. They are both believable as psychoanalysts at the legendary Topeka School. I look forward to every time their characters get some reading time. Those two characters are by far the most interesting narrators in the novel, to these ears at least.
The audiobook's shortcoming is with the voice actor who reads Adam's part--and presumably with the director who was guiding him. Other reviewers have noted the actor's frequent mispronunciations. The Fugees become The FUGUE-EASE. Hobbesian becomes HOB-EASY-AN. And so forth and so on. I didn't make a list, but every time it happened I snapped out of the artwork's air of verisimilitude and into my humdrum world of, like, proper pronunciation of fairly common terms. Also the actor's voice doesn't have the personality and burnish of the voices doing the roles of Adam's parents. Maybe this is to represent the relative callowness of youth, but man is it annoying.
It's unfortunate that such a fine and celebrated novel can have an audio version that, at times, weakens rather than amplifies the power of its prose and its characters. And that the director, engineer, or whomever didn't have the attentiveness to say, 'hey, let's correct the mispronunciations. And can we make Adam's voice less monotone. Hie's more passionate and interesting than he sounds." I think they should do a revised version with a new performance of Adam.
Strong novel about 1990s
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What Was It About?
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I didn’t like it
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Fugue Ease
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