Ben Lerner, _The Topeka School_

THREE FOR THREE--Lerner is batting 1.000 as a novelist, and this one tries some new tricks. The character circumstanced much like Lerner himself is called Adam Gordon this time, but in a swerve from Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 the story is set in the past, when Adam was in high school, rather than in the near-present, and we get the point of view not just of Adam, but also of his parents Jonathan and Jane, both of whom are psychotherapists at a famous clinic located in Topeka (as were Lerner's own parents).

In the first chapter, Adam walks into what he thinks is his girlfriend's family's lakefront house, only to realize slowly that it some other family's house, a mistake enabled by the identical floor-plans and nearly identical furnishings of the neighborhood homes. The vertiginous moment when Adam imagines all the lakefront living rooms superimposed on each other, eerily one and many at the same time, establishes a leitmotif of the novel--but the leitmotif usually functions not in space, but in time, the present uncannily nearly-matching the past. For instance, here Jonathan is on his way to New York, on his way back to Topeka, and in the middle of infidelity, all seemingly at once:

He [Adam] hung up the phone, collected his keys and cigarettes, and left his room on the ninth floor, its windows open to the storm Without noticing, he passed the doorway in which Sima and I were going at it, and got in the elevator. I was traveling furiously toward him in the dark. I was in the plane, cleared to land, flash of distant lightning. The metal doors shut, the landing gear unfolded, and we made our descent, first person and third, together through the clouds. Jane had talked us down. 

Spaces rhyme, moments in time rhyme. Does the novel rely on one of the insights of psychotherapy, that we unconsciously re-trace past patterns, keep re-enacting our past?

Even psychological crises rhyme, as different characters react to fear of being left behind. Jane's publishing a book that makes her famous precipitates some trust-violating intimacy between Jonathan and Jane's mentor Sima; Adam's and friends' imminent departures for prestigious colleges precipitates a terrible assault by Darren, their friend from pre-school who dropped out of high school. And Darren's abruptly throwing a cue ball at a girl's head in someone's basement rec room somehow imposes itself on Adam, now a parent himself, as he writes the novel:

This is 1909; this is 1983; this is early spring 1997 seen from 2019, from my daughters' floor, dim glow of the laptop, "Clair de lune" playing in a separate window [of the building? of the laptop?], as Bone Thugs-N-Harmony plays in the basement.

This superimposition of the similar--this rhyming--is all the more effective in that Lerner does not particularly underline it until the story's coda, when an episode in which he challenges another man for being a negligent parent gives way to a scene in which he is challenged for being a negligent parent. Or--given that the coda is titled "Thematic Apperception"--is the parallel just a readerly projection?

When we say a novel is poetic, we usually (and unfortunately) mean it has extended, eventless passages of description, but this one is poetic in its structure, in the way it uses juxtaposition to create meaning.