Ben Lerner again walks the outer edges of prose form and perspective in his third novel, The Topeka School, a book "about family and art and memory and meaning, how it's made and unmade." The obsession humming under the well-wrought, perfectly paced, at times riveting scenes about family and art and memory, etc. is the troubling rise in power of the man-child, the Large Adult Son, and his penchant for violence and tyranny. Adam is a precocious, Ivy-bound, master debater who excels at extemporaneous speaking. His parents, Jane and Jonathan, are clinical psychologists at the "Foundation," a revolutionary school/clinic/psychiatric training facility that focuses on adolescent mental health. Despite rampant sexism in the field of psychoanalysis, Jane's work in the discipline and her general-audience feminist books about family dynamics have earned her fame. The other main character is Darren, a proto-MAGA hat. Lerner tells the story from the perspectives of all of those characters while also acknowledging through certain literary flourishes that each of those perspectives is really just him. by Rich Smith