Is it because I got a C+ in psychology 101?

a review of The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner is so masc it reeks of axe body spray and will not order a piña colada under any circumstances (even on vacation! At sundown! By the beach! It’s like… come on… live a little). If The Lord of the Flies/A Separate Peace/Catcher in the Rye all convened to play pickle ball and needed a fourth, it would be this book.  

It’s autofiction, a genre that sounds like stories about a Mazda and a Nissan who overcome adversity and fall in love. It’s just autobiography with a name change here, two people combined into one character there and we’ll call it fiction. It’s a genre I contributed to when I was 8 years old and wrote a “book” about a girl who won over the most popular guy in school with her personality despite weird looks and bookish inclinations (Nicknamed by Amy Balmuth… a tight 250 words).

Why did I not like this book? Is it a) because I got a C+ in psychology 101? Is it b) because I’d prefer not to spend my time reading a six page re-cap of a high school debate tournament? To use the language of the psych exams that I did so terribly on: it is c) all of the above.

In my college senior seminar, this guy would never do the readings, sauntering into our 6:30 – 9:00 pm class with PDF print-outs still warm from Case Printer West. Despite my bookish inclinations, I get that reading 200 pages about women of soviet air force is objectively less fun than drinking keystone light in a UV lit basement. But when you choose the keystone option you yield your right to speak for 10 minutes about the soviet air force ladies. It was not the case for Zack* who was the Simone Biles of verbal gymnastics. “Well, the way I see it is… let’s just say you’re a kid… maybe you’re an 8 year old boy… maybe you’re 12…you’re in Afghanistan… maybe you’re in Iraq, or maybe you’re in Kuwait… you’re hiding in your house… an American soldier comes in…,” Zack would say, the preacher all military history hypotheticals and the 8 people in class who actually did all that stupid reading, his congregation. Considering the topic is soviet air force ladies, perhaps at “you’re a 12 year old boy in Afghanistan” you’d think the professor would intervene but no! The professor implicitly declared it a safe space for tomfoolery as Zack monologued about “war in general,” unabated until someone piped up with the “just to build off that last point.”

 And to build off that last point, while The Topeka School is more enjoyable than listening to actual pseudo-intellectual male monologues, it is less enjoyable than reading vegetarian ragu recipes, Yelp reviews of bakeries near me, and national weather service alert for Cook County. 

*Name has been changed because honestly I’m embarrassed I remember this person’s in class performance :/