by Ben Lerner
First published 2019
Adam Gordon is a high school senior in Topeka, Kansas, a championship debate team member whose verbal skills mask deeper family complexities. His psychologist parents—his mother a prominent feminist author, his father a therapist—navigate their own psychological terrain while Adam prepares for national competitions. As adolescent pressures mount, Adam becomes entangled in a web of masculinity, language, and emotional suppression that threatens to unravel his carefully constructed public persona. The Topeka School tracks Adam's senior year, exploring how communication—both weaponized and therapeutic—shapes personal and generational dynamics. His family's intellectual environment becomes a pressure cooker of unspoken tensions, with each character wrestling between public performance and private vulnerability. As Adam moves through debate tournaments and social landscapes, he confronts the intricate ways language can both protect and wound. This is a story about the delicate architecture of American family life, where words are simultaneously shield and weapon.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, family-drama, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Topeka, Kansas
Period: 21st-century
272 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Content warnings: emotional-abuse, mental-illness