One of the hallmarks of Lerner’s fiction is the way that it brings a single consciousness into collision with broad sociopolitical movements. The backdrop of Atocha Station is the Iraq War, already souring globalism, America in decline. In 10:04, it is Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Sandy, and growing questions in the Obama years about whether an American “we,” in a Whitmanesque sense, is still possible. In The Topeka School, Lerner writes from the vantage of 2019, and from the premise that the collective is broken and common discourse has been derailed. The implicit bid of the book is that exploring myopic white male monologuists, simmering with rage in the Midwest in the late 1990s, might shed light on today’s America.

The main action of The Topeka School takes place during Adam’s final year of high school, in 1997. He is the son of two psychologists, Jonathan and Jane, who are members of a famous psychoanalytic institute called the Foundation, something like a “Mayo Clinic for the mind.” Jane’s research—which remains vague but concerns romantic relationships—has made her nationally famous. (Lerner’s mother, Harriet Lerner, a clinical psychologist, rose to national prominence after writing a book about women’s anger that sold millions of copies.) Jonathan is a therapist primarily for disaffected young white men of privilege, teenagers who seem to have everything but who suddenly turn angry, sullen, withdrawn, violent. Jonathan calls them the “lost boys.”

Adam isn’t one of those boys, but he straddles two ways of being. He is part of the hyperintellectual, Freudian world of his parents, where the most successful men think calmly and talk calmly, where emotions require verbal “processing,” and where any adolescent outbursts are followed by “think[ing] along with” his parents about the causes. At the same time, he is immersed in the teenage masculinity of late-’90s Topeka; among his peers, the most expressible emotions are rage or disdain, and the lingua franca is physical violence or torrents of freestyle rap in an absurd—if earnest—appropriation of a black culture they have no direct contact with.

At school, Adam falls in with the kids of the Foundation faculty; the boys among them have a tense and violent relationship with the sons of blue-collar Topekans. The estrangement of these two groups prefigures the elite-versus-real-America animosity that now dominates political and social rhetoric—though what’s striking is how similarly angry and anxious about the demands of masculinity all these young white men seem. Adam often feels lost and enraged for reasons he can’t quite explain. His behavior at home grows so explosive that his parents insist he either see a therapist or learn biofeedback methods for regulating his emotions. He opts for the biofeedback.