There is an anxious, burgeoning genre on the block — or so it has seemed to me lately; I’m engulfed by a wave of new books on masculinity and its discontents.

They are excavations into the history of manhood — and its propensity for violence — from psychoanalytical angles (the prize-winning Italian novel “The Catholic School”) and as sociological phenomenon (see the suite of novels and memoirs by the French writer Édouard Louis). There are memoirs examining the intersections between masculinity, race and sexuality, and memoirs in which men describe their relationships with women, with a mix of candor and, frequently, queasy equivocation. There is, somehow, a healthy category of boxing memoirs — men exploring their relationship to their manhood by getting in the ring. There are guides that offer tips for men who want to admit they’ve caused harm and make amends, and young adult literature offering positive role models for boys as “an antidote to toxic masculinity.”

Many of these books emphasize the exhaustion, and surreality, of constantly “performing masculinity” to be accepted (or merely left alone) by other men. But their real point of commonality is a stated sense of occasion. Most hinge on how recent events — the #MeToo movement and the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and President Trump — have forced masculinity into a moment of self-reflection.

To this pile of books, to their set of seething questions, prevarications and self-recriminations, we can add “The Topeka School,” the latest novel by Ben Lerner, one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, and winner of a MacArthur “genius grant.” Lerner revisits Adam Gordon, the character from his first novel, “Leaving the Atocha Station,” in which he was a spectacularly indolent creature with “a damaged life of pornography and privilege,” loafing in Madrid on a fellowship. In “The Topeka School,” we go back in time to meet him as a teenager, a high school debate star growing up in Kansas, the son of therapists. (As in the earlier books, many of these details are autobiographical; Lerner’s mother is the psychologist Harriet Lerner.) The point of view shifts among the three family members and a classmate of Adam’s, Darren, the high school outcast, whose brief, italicized sections creep through the novel like the dark unconscious of the characters themselves.