Arriving in the land of the Wizard of Oz after a storm, Dorothy (Judy Garland) says to her little dog: “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore. » In Ben Lerner’s book, Adam Gordon, the main character, the author’s fictional double, makes the reverse trip by returning to his hometown, Topeka, capital of Kansas. In the late 1990s, when the novel begins, the Midwest is far from paradise, especially if you’re a progressive and aspiring poet. As for gays, they are the target of pastor Fred Phelps, who heats up his supporters with homophobic slogans. Adam, who is in his final year of high school and has a girlfriend, is passionate about rhetoric and enters the inter-institutional oratory contest where Senator Bob Dole, leader of the Republican Party, comes to scout his future foals. A strange child who sometimes extracts himself from himself, as if his mind were dissociated from his body, Adam has become a worried adolescent, sometimes “complete asshole”, sometimes “funny, curious, friendly”. His parents, Jonathan and Jane, both work at the Foundation, a care center that mixes psychology and alternative therapies, and live in a large Victorian house where “folk singers, community organizers, ‘sexpertes’, authors, specialists in feminism, passing through the Midwest”. Jane, nicknamed the Brain, is also the author of best-selling feminist books.
a stack of time strata
Adopting in turn the point of view of the three characters, Ben Lerner unfolds over several decades the story of an American family with its neuroses, its infidelities, its secrets. A family that would be almost normal if it were settled in New York but clashes with the codes of Topeka, a city where the Gordons and their close friends live as expatriates. Written in italics, a foreign voice comes, in reverse, to interfere in the family romance. It is that of Darren, a teenager from a working class background heard by the police because he hit a high school girl with a billiard ball.
The success of the novel is due as much to what it tells about the fractures of America and the intellectuals who did not see Trumpism coming as to its virtuoso construction, piling up of layers of time, tangle of voices and images. sometimes ironic. It is, for example, Adam, a child, tumbling into his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night after having wrapped his penis in chewing gum. It’s Jonathan, wandering the streets with his mentor, Klaus, whose German accent carries the whole history of European psychoanalysis. Or a crossfade between a short story by Hermann Hesse and the story of an acid trip in the 1960s. Constructed around a painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an Italian painter of the 14th century, of which only the lower part is reproduced in the end as the eternally missing piece of the puzzle, the book affirms, as it advances, its political purpose. Playing with the reader, Ben Lerner almost sheds his fictional mask to merge with Adam, a well-known poet who returned to the city of his childhood with his wife and their eldest daughter, then demonstrated against the border closures imposed by the administration. Trump. A brilliant novel, impeccably translated by Jakuta Alikavazovic, which one would surely have to read several times to grasp all the subtleties.