“Ay, Connie. It might matter in your pueblito in Jalisco, but not here. I heard about a woman who invited ex-boyfriends to her birthing room in the hospital. Imagínate!”

My son’s hands hid his face,
and his narrow shoulders shook
with sobbing. He had no metaphysics

yet, so the pastor’s voice bleated
senselessly over the grave
of his grandmother

A newborn’s heart is about the size of an adult man’s thumb. An adult man’s heart is about the size of that same man’s own fist. At age eleven, Jonah estimates his own heart to be the size of an adult woman’s fist if the woman is slender and strong and doesn’t wear rings.

The Topeka School is both a culmination and departure for Lerner. While the novel expands on many familiar themes seen throughout his oeuvre—the limitations of language, the blurred line between fact and fiction—The Topeka School moves beyond Lerner’s singular consciousness and into other voices.