Speaking in Tongues: Learning to Communicate in Ben Lerner’s Novel ‘The Topeka School’
By Ethan Beck
Adam Gordon has mastered the spread. In Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, Adam is a senior in high school in Topeka, KS during the late 1990s, where he’s starting to figure out all the different ways language can be used. As a debate student, Adam excels at projecting confidence about nonsense. His parents, both therapists, attempt to instill in him the importance of verbally processing his emotions, which he heatedly resists. Instead, Adam uses his linguistic skills for social prowess, mocking his classmates and friends in freestyle rap battles. But, most importantly, he understands that language can be a source of beauty and connection. Adam’s deepest secret in the conservative, tyrannically masculine environment of Topeka High is that he wants to be a poet.
“The problem for [Adam] in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy,” writes Lerner in The Topeka School, his most accomplished and recent novel. As a writer obsessed with the fragmentary nature of poetry, Lerner takes joy in how his characters swish words around like mouthwash, never cohering into any points of connection. “All the novels I’ve written involve scenes of depersonalization, or of language reaching a kind of limit,” said Lerner in a recent interview with The Harvard Advocate. He’s most interested in how speech can give off the appearance of meaning while ultimately harming connection. Lerner’s alter-ego of Adam alternates between lashing out as a debater and freestyle rapper by saying hundreds of words a minute, failing to communicate when he attempts connection, and trying to work through his emotions with therapeutic language passed on by his parents.
At the onset of The Topeka School, Adam is sitting on a boat with his girlfriend, Amber, getting high. Ever convinced of his oratory greatness, Adam talks at Amber for minutes before Lerner cuts through Adam’s supposed expertise: “For a long time [Adam] had been speaking. When he turned to see what effect his speech had had, she was gone.” It’s a strong encapsulation of Adam’s failures. We’re never told what he’s going on about, aside from it being described as a “rambling confession of feeling.” Even when attempting to be vulnerable, Adam conceals his honest feelings within a long stream of nonsense. Amber slips off the boat, unmoved by his regular overspeaking. What could Adam say that was worth hearing?
Adam’s rambling on the boat is a miniature version of the aforementioned spread, a discombobulating assault on the senses via an overabundance of language. We first witness his debate partner Joanna deploy the method as she “accelerates to nearly unintelligible speed, pitch and volume rising.” When cued to argue their points, the pair establishes too many arguments to respond to, presenting more evidence than needed in order to overwhelm their opponents. The two of them create more language for language’s sake, turning words inside out, mitigating the small possibility of truly resonating with their audience. They win because of their speed and authority. No one is convinced by the substance of what they’re saying. Even less is remembered from the speech. It’s all just noise.
The sound and fury of debate infect Adam’s life throughout The Topeka School, but the crux of the novel is the times in which Adam attempts to genuinely express something, anything. His parents, who work at an institute for therapeutics known as The Foundation, encourage him to use his words to find the root of his rage. “As psychotherapists, [the parents] were much less afraid of open conflict than of the prospect of a kid withdrawing […] As long as there was language, there was processing.” This is when the spread becomes a bitter weapon. As a teenager, he utilized it when asked to do his dishes or when told he wasn’t allowed to borrow his dad’s car. He explodes into language with the intent to exhaust his parents. He swings between his “vicious” yet glaringly contradicting arguments and calming down, “deploying his Foundation vocabulary,” and apologizing to his parents for his crass intensity. In moments like these, the spread betrays that Adam is rarely in control of his language, with logic and meaning dwarfed by his lingual power trips.
However, when Adam resists deploying the spread on his parents or girlfriend, he finds language to be a source of beauty and wonder — as long as it’s not an insult. This is clearest with his interest in poetry: “He wanted to be a poet because poems were spells, were shaped sound unmaking and remaking sense that inflicted and repelled violence and made you renowned…and could have other effects on bodies: put them to sleep or wake them, cause tears or other forms of lubrication, swelling, the raising of hairs,” writes Lerner, aware that poems can be one of the most direct expressions of emotions, even for teenage boys. Adam loves language because it can land with a thud or impact, a real change beyond hurting others.
Throughout The Topeka School, Adam wears masculinity in all its stereotypical meanness, crassness, and unearned authority like an ill-fitting sweater. In order to assimilate into Topeka High, he trades in lyrical magnificence for stupidity, attempting to verbally attack his friends whenever rap battles break out: “The key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was bully, quick and vicious and ready to spread an interlocutor with insults at the smallest provocation. Poetry could be excused if it upped your game, became cipher and flow, if it was part of why Amber was fucking you and not Reynolds et al.” Around teenage boys, earnest communication threatens one’s cool (and ultimately, protective) masculinity. Lerner contrasts Adam’s thoughtful yet destructive use of language with another boy, Darren, whose non-communicativeness reflects the type of man Adam’s parents fear he is becoming. A lost boy whose family and social surroundings failed him, Darren lashes out with a cumulative act of violence because he was never taught to process or share.
Lerner’s greatest achievement is the depiction of how these different modes of communication- earnest expressions, masculine assertions, and the nothingness of the spread get jumbled together, resulting in nothing being expressed. The dexterity of the spread paired with an admission of love, the freestyles about “bitches and blunts” accidentally intertwine with how Adam uses therapeutic language. Lerner’s thesis about masculinity is well-intentioned but slightly overwrought. You can feel Lerner fight to make sure Darren, Adam, and the conservative threat of non-communication all cohere into a satisfying narrative. It’s astounding that he gets as far as he does with flowing, engaging prose and the novel’s sheer quantity of narrative threads.
The Topeka School runs through a handful of dizzying formal gambits that help elevate Lerner’s thematic blow-out, from three different narrators (Adam, Jonathan, and Jane) to the framing device of Darren’s story. The novel’s best sequence is written in Jonathan’s voice, where we hear Adam breaking down with his parents after being broken up with in college: “All of [Adam’s] vocabularies were colliding and recombining, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language he’d lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. And something approaching baby talk, regression.” In this linguistic rupture, it’s apparent what’s at stake in the most mundane instances of communication. By depicting Adam in the eyes of his parents, Lerner clarifies why he decided to cover an exhausting amount of ground. From our parents to our peers in elementary school, we’re all taught innumerable types of communication. The challenge of maturity, as Adam learns during that panic attack, is figuring out how to separate the expressive from the harmful.