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tptimmons 's review for:
The Topeka School
by Ben Lerner
This one got me -- I read it, engrossed.
It's a bar-setter for things I'm interested in.
I'll be returning to it.
I want to call Lerner a modernist (despite the also fitting metamodernist labels): the novel is so Joycean, especially The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (is that poem "Adam" slithers on his mom's computer at 2am a version of Daedalus' ecstatic villanelle?).
Mostly, the novel is really really really good: the prose -- SO GOOD! -- the techniques, the small but consequential innovations (with frame, meta- moments, repetition, etc.), and the characters (at least Darren, and Mom).
Although I didn't mind the structural elements that other people have critiqued (the P.O.V./character shifts chapter-by-chapter), I felt this novel actually needed to be longer. My hunch is that Lerner's instincts as a poet trigger a compression-of-prose instinct still, and just slightly. For example, Darren's narrative felt unmotivated, and felt like a missed opportunity as a possible narrative counterweight, at least a much more fully worked out on. Perhaps the book could have halfway been Darren's story too? Another idea: if the novel is a working out of male identity, contrasting this process against the perspective of a female character of Adam's age (say, Amber or Mandy) would have been really compelling, as a way to refract masculinity through an additional prism. I would have love to see Lerner push his imaginative abilities in this direction.
It's a bar-setter for things I'm interested in.
I'll be returning to it.
I want to call Lerner a modernist (despite the also fitting metamodernist labels): the novel is so Joycean, especially The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (is that poem "Adam" slithers on his mom's computer at 2am a version of Daedalus' ecstatic villanelle?).
Mostly, the novel is really really really good: the prose -- SO GOOD! -- the techniques, the small but consequential innovations (with frame, meta- moments, repetition, etc.), and the characters (at least Darren, and Mom).
Although I didn't mind the structural elements that other people have critiqued (the P.O.V./character shifts chapter-by-chapter), I felt this novel actually needed to be longer. My hunch is that Lerner's instincts as a poet trigger a compression-of-prose instinct still, and just slightly. For example, Darren's narrative felt unmotivated, and felt like a missed opportunity as a possible narrative counterweight, at least a much more fully worked out on. Perhaps the book could have halfway been Darren's story too? Another idea: if the novel is a working out of male identity, contrasting this process against the perspective of a female character of Adam's age (say, Amber or Mandy) would have been really compelling, as a way to refract masculinity through an additional prism. I would have love to see Lerner push his imaginative abilities in this direction.