The main protagonist of Lerner’s first book was a young poet named Adam Gordon. Here, in The Topeka School, the centre of the story is also Adam Gordon only this time we straddle the period of Leaving the Atocha Station with views from the late-twentieth century and from now (2019). The Topeka School is, partly, a family history examining the early years of the Gordon family - Jane, a psychologist and then famous feminist author, Jonathan, also a psychologist with a knack for treating wayward boys, and Adam their son, a brilliant debater. But it also includes now and shows us Adam as a grown up, family man.

As with Lerner’s first two novels, there is a large autobiographical, auto-fiction element to this third novel. Lerner himself grew up in Topeka, the child of psychologist parents, and with a keen interest in debating.

The story here unfolds in non-chronological, multi-narrator fashion as each of Jane, Jonathan and Adam take turns to give their perspective. Each of them looks back to formative events in their family history, centred around Adam, but also covering the time before Adam was born.

Between these cycles of narrative, we read of Darren, a mentally disturbed teenager who, as we learn on the very first page, has committed an act of violence that we will learn the relevance of as we progress through the book.

In essence, this is a family story as told by family members looking back. At the same time it is an exploration of some of the forces that have led us to Donald Trump being president of the United States. At times, the cleverness of the structure threatens to overwhelm the story. There is a lot about reflections/reflecting (I guess you would expect that in a novel about a family where both parents are psychologists), there are multiple references to confusion between first and third person, multiple references to speech disintegrating when under pressure, multiple phrases that recur and echo through the book. It is often funny, but it is sometimes funny only because the alternative is to cry. I’ll leave you to discover the Phelps for yourselves - they provide some laugh out loud moments but also represent so much that is wrong in society.

Only a very short time before I read this, I read Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport”. And in many ways, I think these two books make an interesting pairing. Both are concerned with the state of the nation (USA) and, even though they take very different approaches to telling their story, both provide an interesting structure that takes you into the minds and thoughts of their protagonists. Ducks, Newburyport literally inhabits the thoughts of one person (for over 1000 pages) in incomplete sentences that often last for over 100 pages, whereas The Topeka School is a bit more conventional in its grammar and takes us into the minds of three/four people in more of a narrative form than Ducks…’ stream-of-consciousness.

curtisbrown.co.uk says: "Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the new right, the ongoing crisis of identity among white men."

I think that’s a fair summary.