Can’t hear, speak up Joanna Biggs reviews ‘The Topeka School’ by Ben Lerner

• Published in: The London Review of Books Vol. 41; no. 23; p. 16
• Main Author: Biggs, Joanna
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: London London Review Of Books 05-12-2019
• Subjects: Headphones; Narcissism; Remote control
• ISSN: 0260-9592

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner Granta, 304 pp, £16.99, November, ISBN 978 1 78378 572 8 Sometimes I think people who write autofiction are narcissists. But I know for sure, because I am one, that people who read autofiction are narcissists. I once thought that I read about other minds as a release from my own until I came to the scene in Ben Lerner’s last novel, 10:04, in which the writer’s alter ego, Ben, is in a fertility clinic in Brooklyn to produce a cup of sperm for his friend, Alex, to use to get pregnant. I’ve never been to a fertility clinic; I’ve never ejaculated, let alone on command; I’ve never asked a friend to help me get pregnant. And yet. The only thing Ben has been told is that it’s important, in order to avoid contaminating the sample, that his hands are clean, and he has already washed them after touching the remote control. His trousers are around his ankles and Asian Anal Adventures has already started when he realises that his jeans were even more potentially contaminating: I’d been on the subway for an hour; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laundered the things. I shuffled back to the sink with my pants and underwear around my ankles and began to worry about how long I was taking, if there was a time limit, if the nurse was going to knock on the door at some point and ask me how it was going or tell me it was the next patient’s turn. I did the shuffle back to the screen and hurriedly donned the headphones, but then it occurred to me: contact with the headphones was no different than contact with the remote control. I thought about putting an end to this increasingly Beckettian drama and just trying to go on, but then I imagined getting the call that the sample wasn’t usable, and so again shuffled – now wearing the headphones, now hearing the shrieks and groans of the adventurers –back to the sink to wash my hands once more. Above the sink there was mercifully no mirror.