The Topeka School Audiobook By Ben Lerner cover art

The Topeka School

A Novel

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

The Topeka School

By: Ben Lerner
Narrated by: Nancy Linari, Peter Berkrot, Tristan Wright
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.24

Buy for $20.24

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

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 Audio Coming of Age Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
All stars
Most relevant  
A beautiful novel, a beautiful writer. The story was graceful and quiet but moved swiftly, I couldn’t put it down. I felt like it was moving towards something major with the Darren character but it kind of didn’t— regardless of that I still thought it was great. One note is that one of the narrators should know how to pronounce popular musicians names/musical acts, such as Brian Eno (it’s pronounced “eee-no”) and for crying out loud, The Fugees are world famous and pronounced like slang for word “refugee” and not like “FOO-GEES.” How did no one notice this during editing? Embarrassing. It’s 2020 come on.

Great novel, narration flawed...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I listened to this book and still have no idea what it what’s about. There were several points of view...and I have no idea why. The ending was a bit baffling, seeming to come from nowhere, and the main point of the story is completely lost on me.

Droll

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A strong investigation of language, meaning and noise. Not as political as other reviewers complain.

interesting, unique and compelling

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
it took a long time (I was almost done) for this book to teach me how to read it. I found the application of multiple literary gimmicks disorienting, but by the time I got to the end, I suspected the author intended exactly that effect. When I got it, I was impressed by the depth and richness with which the story explores its themes.It is probably worth a second read,, but i doubt I will.. I felt like it was an overwhelming indictment of our expectations of modern masculinity with no glimmer of hope or path foward, which made me sad.

challenging

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A really fantastic story dealing with life in the latter part of the 20th century. I really liked the multiple perspectives (different characters POV and at different times). The "whole" story slowly comes into focus.

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!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I loved this book. Almost everything about it except when the narrator said fuGees with a hard g- duuuude

Sooo gooooood

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Ben Lerner's book is excellent. Very smart about Kansas, town-gown social dynamics, poetry, psychoanalysis,, and more. It is deserving of the wide praise it's earned. It's brainy without being show-offy.

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’m not entirely sure what this book was about and will have to listen again, paying close attention. However, given that confession, I actually truly liked this book, especially the parts I understood.

What Was It About?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The book jumped around too much and the ending came out of nowhere. I would have preferred to understand the linkage between characters earlier in the book.

I didn’t like it

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
One of the narrators pronounced the name of the Fugees incorrectly as "Fugue Ease" and I think the author would be ashamed, considering it is a coming of age tale set in the late nineties.

Fugue Ease

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews