The Nation Reviews Ben Lerner's The Topeka School

Evan Kindley reviews Ben Lerner's The Topeka School (FSG) for The Nation this week. "Nothing is more important to Lerner or his narrators than poetry," writes Kindley, "and yet they’re aware that nothing, in the 21st century capitalist culture they inhabit, is less important to everyone else." Furthermore:

...Indeed, this lack of social importance is a perverse point of pride. “If I was a poet,” muses Adam Gordon, the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station, “I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.” For Adam, “poet” is more of an identity category, an orientation toward capitalist society, than it is a profession or practice. In point of fact, Adam doesn’t even like poetry all that much. “Although I claimed to be a poet,” he confesses, “I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.”

This fictional admission lays out the basic terms of Lerner’s formal cosmology. Poetry represents possibility, utopia, the virtual; prose stands for the existent, the immanent, the actual. The novel, it seems, enables a kind of compromise between these categories, a book written in the prose of the world but containing suggestions that another world is possible. Thus a poet like Adam, or Lerner, may write a novel, but we shouldn’t expect them to be happy about it.