The novel is full of these instances where language gets away from the speaker or hearer, or different registers collapse into one another. A design began to take shape: the parts of a novel narrated by Jonathan and Jane would be interwoven with third-person sections from Adams point of view, forming a kind of narrative rondo in which each characters experience is refracted and reconfigured by the others. The competition for most critically acclaimed, least-read writer in America is intense, but Ben Lerner is surely in the running. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's literary festival Louisiana Literature is back with its 11th edition of quality literature from countries spanning France, Chile, Iceland, USA, Norway, Sweden, South Africa, Germany, England, the Netherlands and Russia. The true measure of Lerners success in The Topeka School of his ambition to write beyond the self and explore what parts of consciousness are shareable lies in the depth and vitality of Adams parents. When we sit down to write, we know we dont have a guarantee, framed and hung over our heads and signed by every philosopher from Plato to Derrida, that what we are about to do will bear fruit and lead to the truth; we face a risk and a gamble every poet either knowingly or unknowingly takes. Lerner wanted to be a lawyer until he discovered poetry in his midteens. For America, spread from above, it remains an open question. Im going to rape you; Somebody should rape you; You were probably raped; If you werent so ugly, youd get raped. Jane suspects that Adam has been listening in on these calls and worries they may be doing lasting damage to his psyche. Is the man grieving, wonders Adam Gordon, the books narrator, or is he having a profound experience of art? The version quoted by Lerner shrugs off poetry, and we nod yes because, of course, we think we know what she is talking about, but as it turns out, we dont. To learn how to speak again, Lerner suggests, you first need to unlearn the old way of speaking. When I first met him in Brooklyn earlier this summer, he and his wife, Ariana Mangual, a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, were about to buy a house in Kensington, not. (The novels title partly plays on the New York School poets Lerner grew up admiring John Ashbery gets a cameo here when Adam goes to hear him speak.) The poet, by his very claim to being a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an accusation. they wanted to know. The Romantic movement restored poetry and imagination, but now poets came to be viewed as either harmless eccentrics or crazed revolutionaries determined to overturn the existing order. That opening phrase, Lerner says, keeps coming back to him every time he attends a poetry reading or when he teaches a class. derivative as to become 3482 Janice Way, Palo Alto, CA 94303 (650) 494-3163 63 Wall St #2309, New York, NY 10005 New York, NY Skokie, IL. they are His wife is Ariana Mangual Ben Lerner Net Worth His net worth has been growing significantly in 2020-2021. It requires seeing her as somebody elses child. Topeka Adam looks forward to a future from which his adolescent experiences can be recounted with great irony, but Brooklyn Adam looks back on him with emotional and intellectual investments his former self could not have anticipated. How Ben Lerner reinvented the social novel for a hyper-self-obsessed age. In a crucial passage, Jane describes the moment when her speech began fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me. Ben Lerner: The move from real space to the weird kind of virtual space of a book felt like a good opportunity, not just to keep working in the pandemic, but that in and of itself this was a . She is interested in how students, who are. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an assistant professor of language education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 10 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA; e-mail: amf@gse.rutgers.edu. Prep alumni are fast assuming leadership roles in every sector of society - from business and law, to science and medicine, to education and the arts. As a teenager, he excelled at competitive debate, and he remains a formidable talker fluent, composed and quick on his feet. Up until the very end he would say, I will scrap this book, Ill delete the whole book if its going to hurt you. They insisted it wouldnt. With its broad social canvas, polyphonic narrative structure and manifest desire to tell a story about not just one mans consciousness but an entire nation, The Topeka School sees Lerner moving into unexpected new territory. What Lerner regards as a tragic flaw of poetry is a given, the way not being able to make a roosters crow heard in a painting is. As for the hatred of poetry, heres what I think. You know, people basically dont want to be written about, even if its favorable, because they have their own story and their own way of viewing it. A few days after she sent the book, a bunch of flowers appeared on her doorstep. Dr. Ariana Mangual Figueroa. they cannot afford to smoke. Lerner (left) with brother, Matt, in Phoenix in the early 1980s. In The Topeka School, Lerners extraordinary new novel, the story of the chewing gum is recounted by Jane Gordon, a fictionalized version of the authors mother. This novel is the first time Lerner has explicitly approached the subject of his parents and their enormous influence on him, but throughout the trilogy the impulse towards writing fiction, and ambivalence about that impulse, is tangled up in questions of parentage. I can see why, if I, the historical person, choose to write a book thats set in Brooklyn and talks about book advances and eating bluefin tuna or whatever, that its just automatically inthe category of the self-absorbed, says Lerner. If one asks them if they like poetry, they say no, but once they hear a poem they like, their interest is aroused, leading in severe cases to paternal panic and inner torments such as Ben Lerner describes in his book. genuine, you are interested Lerner describes this section as the big psychological gamble at the core of the book, and its also the place where it becomes clearest that Lerners interest in language that conceals rather than reveals has never been only intellectual or artistic its also connected to intergenerational trauma. If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. And the article misstated the location ofan anti-ICE protest in Lerners most recent novel,The Topeka School.Itwas Manhattan, not Brooklyn. His wife is Ariana Mangual Ben Lerner Net Worth His net worth has been growing significantly in 2021-2022. Reading it, however, with a Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Ariana Mangual Join one of America's leading writers to discuss his new book Ben Lerner is acclaimed for novels, poetry, stories and essays that play with notions of fiction and often engage with contemporary art. The novel, published by an independent non-profit press in the US, received critical praise, but Lerners sudden transition to prose fiction worried some of his fellow poets. That this little-understood and often marginalized human activity has given the world some of the greatest works of literature, many of which have outlived the civilizations and the languages in which they were originally composed, is beyond dispute. At age 10, we learn, Ben announced that he wanted to get his ear pierced. This is the source of much of the books humor. Jane, in particular, is an astonishing creation; it is hard to think of another character in recent fiction who shows up so vividly on the page. As the final book in his acclaimed trilogy is published, The Topeka School author reflects on writing as his mother and pompous Great American Novels. In Leaving the Atocha Station, his young poet agonizes about the incommensurability of language and experience. Its no news that words fail to do justice to what we see or feel; that we find ourselves struck dumb by too much beauty or horror. This includes his assets, money, and income. And it sounds more like her. For Lerner, the whole drama of the book is the present-tense Adam remembering his childhood from his parents perspective, because he has more access to their voices than he does to the child version of himself. Jane describes aspects of their family life, the institutional sexism she faced in her career and the misogynist trolling (as a child Adam often picks up the landline phone and encounters men calling to whisper abuse at the famous feminist) and damaged friendships that resulted from her success. These glitches in the narrative flow arent part of a metafictional game, a redundant reminder that what were reading is all made up; they are Lerners way of dramatizing his lack of confidence in his ability to speak for others, let alone the country as a whole. Adam must come to terms with his own helplessness in a hostile political environment, with not knowing what hes doing, even as he understands that hes responsible for himself and his daughters, that there is no higher authority to appeal to certainly not the state, and not his mother either. He treats the self like an archive of social data from which it is possible to construct a larger story about our times. Education: Brown University, B.A., 2001, M.F.A., 2003. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.Search for more papers by this author. As they stand side-by-side before the painting, Alex breaks the silence: Im 36 and single, she says, apropos of nothing. Then she asks Ben if he will donate his sperm to her so she can have a child. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, begins with a scene in the Prado in Madrid. People complain that the spread divorces policy debate from the real world, that nobody save perhaps for auctioneers uses language in this maniacally accelerated fashion. He was standing there completely naked, and hed wrapped his penis in chewing gum, she told me recently. Even the enlightened eighteenth century of Hobbes and Locke with their elevation of reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy denounced poetry, since a rational mind finds it intolerable to be in the company of imagination. Without cake?2. Ben's wife is known as Ariana Mangual who is an education professor at Rutgers University. Erica O. Turner and Ariana Mangual Figueroa. Its a literary homage (the poet Charles Olson wrote an essay about the term) but also a refrain about the poor perceptual relationship of the individual to the social body. The misery of the homeless in this country and the horrendous lives of our working poor, to give just two examples, are rarely, if ever, noticed. What kind of art assumes, he asks himself, the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? BEN LERNER. View the profiles of people named Arianna Nicolette Mangual. Giles Harvey is a contributing writer. Hed opted not to read the manuscript, but the week it came out he called his mother in a frantic state and asked her to overnight him a copy. Who Is Ben Lerner's Wife? [1] Was his failure to be moved by the same painting, or by other paintings to the same degree, a sign of fraudulence or deficiency? We were barreling down a stretch of highway toward Lawrence, a university town in northeastern Kansas, where Harriet and Stephen have lived for the past 17 years. Who in their right mind would choose a lifetime of poverty and ridicule? Lerners escape hatch is a kind of synthesis, a narrative mode that dares to imagine the inner lives of other people while at the same time foregrounding how such efforts are always faulty and provisional, riddled with blind spots. They hear a great variety of poets and even purchase their books afterward. He is from United States. Lerner describes the narrator of thatbook as a neurotic version of myalready quite neurotic self. 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