Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but a penis wrapped in gum is never just a penis wrapped in gum. “I’m going to rape you Somebody should rape you You were probably raped If you weren’t so ugly, you’d get raped.” Jane suspects that Adam has been listening in on these calls and worries they may be doing lasting damage to his psyche. “There were variations on the theme of rape,” she tells us. Reagan is in office, the backlash against the second wave of feminism is in full swing and Jane has begun to receive anonymous phone calls from aggrieved men, analog precursors of today’s digital trolls.
1 It isn’t hard to see why it has struck a chord. When her son, Adam - Lerner’s alter ego - pays her and her husband, Jonathan, a night visit with his gum-encased genitals, she has recently shot to fame with the publication of a book about women’s anger. Like Harriet, Jane is a therapist at a leading psychiatric clinic and a best-selling author. In “The Topeka School,” Lerner’s extraordinary new novel, the story of the chewing gum is recounted by Jane Gordon, a fictionalized version of the author’s mother. “Even his balls were covered, right?” Matt called out from behind the wheel of the rented minivan. It was late August, and Ben, together with his older brother, Matt, and their wives and children, were in town for a visit. 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. “He’d somehow managed to cover his entire penis in gum.” “He was standing there completely naked, and he’d wrapped his penis in chewing gum,” she told me recently. It took her a moment to figure out what she was looking at. When he didn’t respond, Harriet switched on the bedside light and beckoned him over. In a casual tone, he told them he’d had an accident: Some gum had fallen out of his mouth while he was going potty. Why wasn’t Ben asleep? they wanted to know. It was late, and Harriet and Stephen - clinical psychologists at the world-renowned Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kan.
One evening in the mid-1980s, when he was 6 or 7, Ben Lerner appeared in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom.
0 kommentar(er)
