Lerner’s novel is auto-fiction, written from the perspectives of multiple narrative voices, but also trying to comment on the larger societal forces that have shaped America today. It uses the microscopic lens of one boy’s coming of age to comment on macro political trends. Lerner’s “Self” is fictionalized as Adam Gordon, a senior at Topeka High, class of 1997. The novel shifts between being told in the third person from high school Adam’s vantage point to contemporary first person narratives by his father, Jonathan, and his mother, Jane. The novel also sometimes gets meta, with contemporary Adam, speaking as a novelist in 2019, interjecting with commentary. “Who is this unsmiling seventeen-year-old boy whose hair is drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised?” The chapters flow seamlessly between these voices. The multiple perspectives allow the family history to gradually unfold through flashbacks, as the reader sees how the family unit has been shaped by each individual’s subjective processing of past events. Both of Adam’s parents are psychoanalysts, adding to the layers of disguised meaning. During the course of the narrative, sexual boundaries are explored, gender roles are questioned, alcohol and drugs are abused, race and socioeconomic hierarchy is churned over, multiple infidelities are exposed, repressed incest is recollected, and a thrown cueball breaks a young girl’s jaw. It is also a hilarious book. “Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.”
The novel deals with the tensions of being the Gordons, an intellectual family stuck living in Kansas. “The problem for him in high school was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy—even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony.” Lerner suggests that the process of growing up for an adolescent boy was all one big pose. It involved navigating the subtle images that one wanted to project to multiple audiences at once—your parents, your peers, your teachers. “The thin beige braided belt he wore to secure his sagging pants for instance somehow constituted less a single bad decision than a deep incomprehension of the language game in which he was attempting to feign fluency.” Even adult role models teach that your image of Self is a role one puts on. “You need to be winning hearts as much as minds. What you have in your favor is Kansas. You have Midland American English. I want quick swerves into the folksy. “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” That kind of thing. I want you saying, right after some hyper-eloquent riff about Yeltsin breaking a promise, “Now, in Kansas, we call that a lie.” After you go off about a treaty regulating drilling in the Arctic: “Now, in Kansas, we wouldn’t shake on that.” I don’t care if they’re tried-and-true. Say “tried-and-true.” Say “ain’t” if you want. You can go agrammatical so long as they know it’s a choice, that it’s in quotes. Interrupt your highbrow fluency with bland sound bites of regional decency. Why do you think they elect Texans who went to Yale, Arkansan Rhodes Scholars?” Lerner implies that there was a fine line, made up of tiny individual life decisions, that separated him, now a professor of English at Brooklyn College, from the boys who would grow up to be stuck in Topeka, now wearing red MAGA hats in 2019. “Instead of focusing on the fight, zoom in on the fascinating and absurd spectacle of the gang signs that precede it: Reynolds, the son of Realtors, working his fingers into the word “blood,” throwing up his set, miming the manual language of a Los Angeles street gang to which he could bear no coherent relation; see Nowak, who has a real if unloaded pistol tucked into the waist of his sagging jeans, respond with a rapid array of finger movements based on the signs of “Folks,” which originated in the projects of Chicago, which may or may not have been a presence in Topeka, but certainly not among these white kids mainly bound for college who had no volk beyond their common privilege.” Throughout Adam’s life, everything, in the end, comes down to power dynamics. “We were a couple of privileged crackers with divergent parenting strategies; we were two sovereignless men in a Hobbesian state of nature on the verge of primal confrontation.” Lerner’s novel questions how much of one’s Self is really up to the individual; how many of one’s actions are shaped by a past we might have no control over. “I was having my own experience of depersonalization, no drugs involved—an overwhelming sense of frames of reference giving way, of the past and present colliding in on one another.”
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