The Topeka School, No. 2

I like Ben Lerner's prose for being clean and clear. I was having trouble finding a paragraph that could be easily quoted and then I ran across this passage:

I turned around, saw his smile. Then, as if I'd closed the distance with one step, I was inches away from high, the bad father, looking down on him, very white scalp where his black hair was thinning, my hands cold, a familiar sign of migraine and/or rage, a symbolic system breaking down inside the body. He was tall, had the advantage of reach, would score high on the so-called ape index, whereas my own habitus was monitored closely by doctors for signs of a genetic syndrome I prayed nightly I had not bequeathed to my girls, tracking the dilation where the aorta  meets the heart. Still, I felt that I could take him, not that I'd been in a real fight since Topeka. Unlike in Topeka, it was improbable he was armed; I saw no handgun printing through his clothes. Instinctually, I went for an element of discursive surprise: I've been trying to enlist your help, I said, leaping with a Foundation vocabulary, but delivering it as though I were talking shit; I've been asking for your help in making the playground a safe space for my daughters; I recognize that my reaction to your son is not just about your son; it's about pussy grabbing; it's about my fears regarding the world into which I've brought them. the bad father, clearly startled by the mixture of passion and dispassion, the tangle of vocabularies, responded: Let the kids figure it out. My boy's playing on the slide; he's not harassing anyone. He's seven years old, okay?

pp. 269-70; The Topeka School (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux., 2019)

Two parents interacting within a New York City park.  For me there is the message of how violence is always underlying our civilized behavior. I know that feeling' It's one I need to keep under control for I fear a stroke nowadays. 

More narrowly, Lerner uses indirection to tell his story by filling in the gaps he puts into his narrative. The narrator cannot face his violence or the damage it does and must tell  his story obliquely. 

I put Lerner into a grouping of my own creation that includes Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon, and Jonathon Lethem. They all seem to have a similar coolness to their prose and a certain New York kind of vibe. They all leave me wondering about my own place in this country and its moraltiy.

sch

3/1/20