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an_aesthetic 's review for:
The Topeka School
by Ben Lerner
I kept vacillating between hating what I was reading and admiring an author that is clearly intelligent. I turned out to be correct on this front because the author apparently was a Fulbright scholar. This book has a million accolades—it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, one of Obama’s favorite books. But is it actually good? Ehhh debatable. There’s just so many things going on in the story and I need some kind of Sparknotes version to understand how everything connects and to be able to appreciate this book to its fullest extent
It’s basically about a very privileged, unlikeable family of three dealing with their individual issues which includes, marital transgressions, past trauma, toxic masculinity, psychological analysis, and that’s just to name a few. While there were swaths of the book I enjoyed, overall it was really overwrought, both the writing and the complex plot (if it can even be called a plot). Everything was kind of meaningless precisely because it was so complex. Like if the reader is bored or confused, what’s the point? The writing was so dense and longwinded, by the time I got to the end of the sentence, sometimes I would forget what I just read. But weirdly I guess I didn’t end up hating the book. The parts of the book I liked were really good, it’s just that those parts were few and far between.
It’s basically about a very privileged, unlikeable family of three dealing with their individual issues which includes, marital transgressions, past trauma, toxic masculinity, psychological analysis, and that’s just to name a few. While there were swaths of the book I enjoyed, overall it was really overwrought, both the writing and the complex plot (if it can even be called a plot). Everything was kind of meaningless precisely because it was so complex. Like if the reader is bored or confused, what’s the point? The writing was so dense and longwinded, by the time I got to the end of the sentence, sometimes I would forget what I just read. But weirdly I guess I didn’t end up hating the book. The parts of the book I liked were really good, it’s just that those parts were few and far between.