The technique was controversial (it has since, I understand, fallen out of favor) because many believed it detached what were intended to be policy debates from the real world, as each argument carries through a series of logical fallacies to an endgame that leads to either fascism or, more often, the total collapse of the global order-and not in the good way. The primary figure for this genealogy is “glossolalia,” which emerges first in the novel in a speech and debate technique called “the spread.” When the novel begins, Adam, very much an extemporaneous debater of his time, has nearly mastered the spread, which relies on the speaker achieving “nearly unintelligible speed, pitch and volume.” 2 The idea is to “make more arguments, marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time” (TS, 22).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for Lerner, the novel locates that explanation in what Adam describes as a “genealogy” of political speech. Written by an older Adam who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and daughters, The Topeka School looks back on the twilight of the Clinton era for an explanation of his (our) present.

He has, however, taken his first steps down that path as both the most fluid free-style rapper amongst his affluent white friends and, more importantly to the novel, as a gifted speech and debate competitor expected by many to win it all at nationals in his senior year of high school. Set primarily in Kansas in 1997, poetry is still very much in Adam’s future. The Topeka School is both a prequel to Leaving the Atocha Station and a spiritual successor. Adam is skeptical not only that this man’s tears are a response to a “profound experience” of art, but that any man’s tears could be. The man, he notes, “broke suddenly into tears, convulsively catching his breath.” Watching him, Adam worries “that was incapable of having a profound experience of art” and has “trouble believing that anyone had” (LAS, 8). 1 That skepticism takes its most pronounced form in the opening scene when Adam describes a museum goer in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Early in Ben Lerner’s 2011 novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator and aspiring poet, Adam Gordon, expresses his desire for “language becoming the experience it described,” even as he doubts that such an experience of language, and art more generally, is possible at all.

Ben lerner 10 04 summary