The Topeka School

As in Lerner's previous novels, the narrative contains autobiographical elements. Like the protagonist, Adam Gordon, Lerner grew up in Topeka and won a national debate championship in high school, and like Adam's mother Jane in the novel, Lerner's mother, Harriet Lerner, is a psychologist who has published best-selling books aimed at a non-academic audience.^[4] Critics Rumaan Alam and Christine Smallwood have referred to the book as an example of autofiction.^[5][4]

The novel is set primarily in Topeka, Kansas, in the late 1990s,^[6] and is told mainly from the perspective of three characters: Adam Gordon, a high school debate champion, and his parents Jane and Jonathan, who are psychologists at a local institution known as the Foundation. In a nonlinear narrative, the novel explores Adam's preparation for a national debate championship (which he wins), his relationship with his girlfriend Amber, and his parents' lives. One of Adam's classmates, Darren Eberheart, a social misfit and patient of Adam's father, also features in a sequence of shorter chapters that culminates in him seriously injuring a girl at a party who rejected his romantic advances after years of bullying by his peers. The final chapter takes place in 2019 and follows Adam, now a father of two young girls, as he and his wife take their family to Topeka from their home in New York City to give a reading of Adam's work. Back in New York City, they attend a protest of the Trump administration's family separation policy.

Writing for The Paris Review, Nikki Shaner-Bradford praised Lerner's prose.^[7] Christine Smallwood, writing for Harper's Magazine, referred to Lerner as a "supremely gifted prose stylist, at once theoretical and conversational."^[4] Garth Risk Hallberg in The New York Times Book Review acclaimed the novel as "a high-water mark in recent American fiction."^[8]

The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by both The New York Times Book Review^[9] and The Washington Post.^[10]