I’m not really sure what to make of this novel by Ben Lerner. My book club selected it for our October discussion, and I never read a synopsis or reviews of a book I know I’m going to read because I don’t want to go in with any preconceived ideas of what the book is going to be like. That was probably to my detriment this time around because I got pretty lost trying to figure out what this book was about.
For starters, I listened to the audiobook, and while I like the fact that it had 3 narrators to cover different points of view, one of the narrators read the parts of two different characters who were the same age and gender, and that just meant that I couldn’t tell them apart.
It turns out the one kid, Darren, is a high school loner with anger management issues. His parents, not knowing what else to do, send him to see Jonathan, who works at the Foudation, a renowned psychiatric clinic in Topeka.
Adam is Jonathan’s son, is on the debate team, and invites Darren to start hanging out with him and his friends without realizing that Darren is also his father’s patient. Things go horribly wrong when Darren smashes a girl’s face in with a cue ball. That’s not a spoiler because the book starts out with Jonathan trying to get Darren to explain why he did that. Then the story starts at an earlier point and works its way back to the cue ball incident.
Adam’s membership on the debate team is pretty funny because debate strategy has devolved to the point where each contestant is trying so hard to address each of their points in the allotted time that they end up speaking gibberish.
Each of Adam’s parents have a few sections talking about their lives and experiences, and as good as those sections were, I didn’t quite see how they fit with Adam’s and Darren’s stories.
Jane, Adam’s mother, also works at the Foundation with her husband and is fed up with the patriarchal bullshit she has to put up with there. She wrote a whole book about it, which has won her both accolades and more patriarchal bullshit. I have to say that the way she handled the men who called to threaten her was brilliant and I loved it.
While promoting her book, Jane is also coming to terms with long-buried memories of her father abusing her when she was very young. Oddly enough, she seems to struggle more with her relationship to her mother after these memories resurface than her relationship to her father.
Jonathan gets to tell us his story for a while, too, but it is, by far, the least interesting of the four stories. It focuses on his affair with his wife’s best friend and that story is just too old to have any interest for me.
I will say that the prose in this book is beautiful and I appreciated how Lerner could connect a scene to an earlier scene with just one line. I would definitely be interested in reading more of his stuff … as long as I read the synopsis first.