Ben Lerner, the celebrated young poet and novelist in town for the Chicago Humanities Fest late last month, is said to have once apologized to an audience of poets for having even written a novel. Since then, Lerner—a 2015 MacArthur fellow for his poetry and fiction—has become something of a cult hero for the literary inclined, myself included. His three novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and now The Topeka School (2019), all written in the genre of “autofiction” (i.e., the self-conscious fictionalization of events and people from a writer’s real, lived experience), stand out even among works by other recent practitioners of the genre such as Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgaard. They’re even funny.
“I’ve talked to people about the book and they’ve been like, ‘Wow, this book is really down on therapy,’” Lerner said. “And other people said, ‘This book’s a real celebration of therapy.’ I think that’s probably right; it’s both things.”
by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
