by Varun Gauri

In my last speech of my last high school debate round, at the finals of the Ohio championships, I claimed victory because our opponents, a team from the local private academy, our nemesis, neglected or “dropped” our argument that taxing cigarettes would certainly, absolutely, trigger nuclear war. Therefore, I declared, whatever you, dear judge, think of that argument or of our fast-talking style, a notorious debate technique known as “the spread,” there is no choice but to declare us winners. The rules of the game are binding.
“In the middle of the spread” are the last words of Ben Lerner’s widely acclaimed novel The Topeka School, which centers on a Kansas high school debater (Adam Gordon, seemingly a Lerner stand-in), as well as his partying friends, in the narrative retellings — de-centered, non-chronological, tense-shifting, montage-like — of his psychologist parents, his young debating self, a troubled family friend, and the debater as parent and “well-known poet,” who Lerner is. The primary thematic concern of the novel is the role of language in personal and public life. “A quote like that can save your life,” says the debater’s father, speaking of his colleague Klaus, whose family died in the Holocaust.
“The spread,” both a concentration and deformation of language, is a prominent image throughout this mesmerizing novel, standing in for the “thousands of generations technical progress” that make automobiles and other modern marvels possible, but also widespread alienation and predation in the modern world (“corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time”). Even poets will deliver “nonsense as if it made sense.” There appears to be an “instinct to spread,” given that language and culture, like the intermingling personal and professional relationships among the debater’s parents’ colleagues, commingle self-referentially, incestuously. They are quotation machines. For the person ensnared in the spread, “there is no outside, but one vast interior.” The novel, as it progresses, enacts the poetic spread by constructing an ever thicker, and continually illuminating, web of internal quotations and references. Some novels are praised for their “world building.” This novel is a hypnotizing feat of consciousness building. Read more »