Ben Lerner on 'The Topeka School' and the Power of Silence

I think novels are good at showing how each of us is made up of an array of contradictory discourses-language we've learned from our family, from the mass media, from the arts, from our schooling, etc. And this is a book about Adam trying to figure out where his voice comes from and where it's going-what voices he wants to honor in his own (aspects of his parents' voices, say, or his kind of grandparent of affinity, Klaus) and what voices he wants to edit out, what patterns he wants to break (his right-wing troll of a debate coach, for instance, or the various languages of misogyny).

So while I know what you mean about it being technical, I think the book's focus on language is actually very emotional and hopefully political-because it's about how we relate to the past and imagine the future on an individual and, at least potentially, a collective level.

I did feel like "the spread" in high school debate is a metaphor (however necessarily inexact) for the overload of the present.

It's written from the disaster of the present and there is no question that the election of Trump clarified the rise-which is also a return-of a kind of fascist rhetoric. And I wanted to think-from a very personal perspective (meaning I wanted to examine my own misuses of language, too)-about how language can be evacuated or weaponized or otherwise used against the possibilities of love and collective life. I did feel like "the spread" in high school debate-the way debaters just try to make as many arguments as they can so that their opponents can't respond to them all, a tactic which involves speaking so fast people often start to pass out and have to gasp for breath-is a metaphor (however necessarily inexact) for the overload of the present.

Trump-like many politicians-speaks incredibly slowly, inarticulately, a jumble of racist signalling, but he also "spreads" his opponents in the sense that he's learned that while one big scandal might sink a presidency, having a thousand scandals a day incapacitates people. Who can possibly keep up with all the outrages? So the book's concerns precede Trump-Trump represents continuity with the worst in America, not just something new-but yeah, the reversion to unreason that is upon us saturates the book.

Much of the novel is autobiographical for sure, as is openly acknowledged. And I think of the three books as a trilogy about someone who certainly resembles me (though there is plenty of fiction thrown in).

I've always loved books like Rosmarie Waldrop's The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter or Sybil Bedford's A Legacy that are at once drawn from life and depart from it in crucial ways (make different characters into one character or vice versa, imagine periods that precede the narrator's birth, and so on). I also think that-while using your biography leaves you open to charges of self-obsession-it's a way of refusing the "great American novel" myth, the myth that (a white guy) could write for everyone, access every perspective, allow the particulars of his situation to go unmarked.

I'm not sure everybody has bad experiences with psychologists in this book, although certainly psychotherapy and psychiatry don't offer magic solutions that can somehow solve larger political and social problems. But I feel like Jonathan's (Adam's dad's) attempts to help young men are genuine, that the kind of listening Jane models is informed by therapy, even that Adam's experiences with biofeedback (which probably doesn't count as part of "psychiatry") offer him a counter-model to masculine violence.

I think I've probably been influenced as a writer by having therapist parents-because therapists understand silence as powerful (something poets also are attuned to), and think a lot about patterning (which is how works of art are formed).