The swelling of the sphere of sound when Windows 95, Lauryn hill’s rap vocals on the Fugees Album “The Score”, the erratic clicking, noise and beeping noises of a dial-up modem: again and again in the reading of the new novel by Ben Lerner tempted to visualize it in the digital archive of the presence of the sound-world of the nineties once again. “The Topeka school” is this: a literary Wayback Machine, which is not expected to lead to a few readers that your youth is well and truly over, Yes a different era belongs to. And because of this Know without any palliative-you-still happens-sentimentality, echoes the reading in the reader for far longer than the echo effects in some of the Fugees Song “Ready or not, here I come, you can’t hide.”
Ben Lerner, born in 1979, is in addition to Joshua Cohen, and Maggie Nelson, one of the most ambitious younger writers in the contemporary American literature, and, accordingly, his novel will be much more than the self-historicizing portrait of a past decade. Be already of Barack Obama, the recommended book is the attempt to explain the political and social turmoil of today’s America as a result of a development that began in the nineties. To do this, he sets a priority in the language, while the plot that he unfolds achronologisch in scenes, memories and conversations that occur largely in the Background.
“is Your plus point Kansas”
The main setting of the eponymous Topeka, the capital of the state of Kansas and also a learner’s place of birth (the novel shares a few Details with the life of the author). Very much richer than in places the book is, however, of linguistic registers, which combine to create a dissonant polyphony: The trained language of psychoanalysis encounters the cynical rhetoric of the policy, the chauvinistic Slang orientation of unemployed young men met the militant fury of religious fundamentalists, and all this “spitting” by Eminem and his angry Rap rants about the channels.
The majority of voices belong to the characters in the novel, part of which is also its narrator: once Adam, the young Protagonist, the conclusion is on the verge of his high school; then his parents, Jane and Jonathan, together in a kind of psychiatric commune with Seventies Flair to operate; and, finally, Darren, a Patient of Jonathan and of the same age friend Adam, whose privileged life is happening mainly between the army shop and castle shop.
