Discussed in this essay:

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 304 pages. $27.

Ben Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School, opens in the late 1990s, when Adam Gordon is a high school senior. Adam’s hair is “drawn into a ponytail while the sides of his head are shaved, a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised.” He suffers from migraines, a legacy of a childhood concussion, and his status among his peers as “champion of dorks” rests on his…