I don't know if I'll check out The Topeka School, but I thoroughly enjoyed Giles Harvey's writing in this review.

I discovered "The Dance of Anger" as I was leaving the man I'd married too young for the wrong reasons, who, like my mother, wanted to "fix" me. As a how-to, it remains the most useful book I've ever read, saving me thousands of dollars in therapy and years of angst and I've bought multiple copies over the decades, both to replace lent copies that never came back and to provide friends who could use it with copies of their own.

I immensely enjoyed Lerner's "Leaving the Atocha Station", a work that a lot of other people find to be dithering and pretentious. I read "Topeka School" over the last couple days and found it deeply disappointing. It doesn't so much "analyze" white male rage as it does assert, over and over again, that it exists and it is harmful. This amounts in practice to a repetition, over and over again, of the phrase "toxic masculinity" and to a mentally ill white male character who injures a teenage girl at a high school party and becomes a Trump supporter. Lerner's depiction of this character mixes pity and contempt and includes little else. The book also interpolates some of the more repulsive Trump quotes, as if we don't see those enough already. I read literary fiction to gain something I don't get from reading the news or my Twitter feed. With "Topeka School" I just don't see the value-added. The book is like one of those oft-derided NYT articles where a couple of old white guys at a diner are asked why they support Trump and they return a stock answer that the newspaper reports as if it's profound wisdom. Maybe if we're trying to actually understand Trump we ought to go somewhere else. The diner is as empty in "Topeka School" as it is in this newspaper.

"The word “autofiction” was first coined by the author Serge Doubrovsky, who described the style, on the back cover of his 1977 novel “Fils,” " So, how is autofiction different from the "I novel" genre, which started around 1906? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Novel

"To Decode White Male Rage" Do white males feel rage? I did not know. I know many, many white males and am one myself. I am not aware of this rage. If we attribute some characteristic or attitude to "women" or "blacks" would it pass muster with the editors or readers of the Times? The person who wrote this fancies themself a professional writer. Is this the best they can do in trying to describe some group of people?

Sounds like politically correct poppycock, as interpreted by a man unable to regard with skepticism trendy social memes. I mean, "Anything a white male writes is going to be disfigured by that subject position"? Gimme a break. This reads like the confession in a Stalin show trial. It will no doubt go down well in the self congratulatory, politically correct atmosphere of the modern university. As for me, I reckon I got to light out for the Territory.

And the guy's book is about what again?

On closer scrutiny, it turns out that the Ben Lerner’s “white make rage” concept is code for intellectualism vs. pedestrianism. Ben Lerner’s book “The Topeka School”, appears to be more about the travails of “what happens when a conspicuous brilliant Jewish intellectual gets born in the wrong place.” A brilliant genius, alone and frustrated in a sea of “non-brilliant” (aka dumb) Kansas City boys ignited the rage of which this article speaks. “Today, Lerner lives in New York City, where being a Jewish intellectual is, if not exactly common, at least a recognized cultural type.” The Tablet, Sept.25, 2019 Of course, the Kansas City HS kids, now adults, are deep in the vortex of economic despair thanks to the brilliant intellect of Wall Streeters that gave us the 2008 Great Recession. Not a “mild lacrimal event,” to use Lerner’s rococo phrase, but an existential dilemma of the life and death kind.

This critical essay of the roots of Lerner's career and the technique of telling the story in "The Topeka School", for some reason reminded me of my two experiences reading J. D. Salinger's "Catcher In the Rye". The first time, I was in my mid to late 20's. The second time, approximately ten years later. Of course, I reveled in Holden's honesty, and his efforts to root out and expose hypocrisy. My second reading, in my 30's....Holden was a jerk

This is an interesting write-up of Lerner's career, and he certainly seems like a significant talent. However, calling him "the most talented writer of his generation" seems a bit subjective, no?

As a white mother of two, living in Brooklyn, professor at a nearby university, and native of Topeka, KS, I relate to Ben’s new “novel” more than words can say and think it is truly the story of us all. Reading this supreme example of ingratiating profile journalism has also allowed me to reflect on how societal rage isn’t male, but largely female subjectivity masquerading as an auto fiction exercise. Good lord. May Ben Lerner save us all!

You want “semantic vertigo”? Try book 3 of The Bear by Bill Faulkner.

Why is a female (mother) being linked to "white male rage?" Men have only themselves to blame for their own failures, just like everybody else.

I write from Madrid. I discovered Lerner through Leaving the Atocha Station. It's one of the few novels (?) or texts of any kind written in English, let alone by a US author, that doesn't exceptionalize that particular non-English-speaking landscape. It displaces all that tradition, hard-wired into the Protestant imaginary since Merrimee at least. Intriguingly, it also displaces the Madrid bombings of 2004, mostly associated with Atocha Station though the attacks included other sites (let's not forget that the George W. and Blair administrations likewise silenced those atrocities when invoking islamist terrorism). A sort of elephant in the room (or elephant like a white hill). To say I enjoyed 'Atocha' and other books (I've since read Angle of Yaw and 10:04) doesn't quite cut it. The pleasure was in the writing itself (humbling, oh that I could put words together like that). Not easy reads but then neither is Eliot or Faulkner. Frank Kermode once said a propos of The Waste Land something like, 'just let the words wash over you'. There's a scene in Some Came Running where Dave (Frank Sinatra) is talking to Gwen (Shirley MacLeane) about his writing. The details are foggy right now, but the gist is that he's worried she won't understand his work. She hits back with something like, 'I don't understand you, but I still like you'. She may have said 'love'. That's how I feel about Lerner (and others).

This book reads like a Noah Baumbach movie without the charm and all the reinforced stereotypes of our current moment. The only thing less interesting than books with writers as protagonists (Bolano) is protagonists with pychologists for parents, let alone two! Lerner has manage to do both, though I guess that makes sense. Cue "internal conflict" and endless fruedian ruminations. It has all the cringe worthy grasps for authenticisy of the creative writing that comes out of University of Denver or Brown. What did Brett Easton Ellis call this moment in time? The end of nuance, I think. I was stunned by how much this novel, which felt more like an essay, turned individuals into cardboard cut out hyperboles. It's a shame that readers may end up reading Murnane in anyway that attaches itself to the aesthetics of American poets who write novels.

Reading this, I thought I might learn something about white male rage in the era of Trump. Instead, we get a blathering biographical narrative that wanders all around like an unguided missile, starting with a boy who wraps his genitals in chewing gum. Clearly an emotionally disturbed child, who becomes an emotionally disturbed adult, but - how does this weirdly tortured individual saga elucidate the rise of white male rage? What did I miss?