Excellent story from Mary South in New Yorker and Ben Lerner's ambious novel, The Topeka School

Two notes: First, the Mary South story in the current New Yorker, You Will Never Be Forgotten, apparently the title story in her forthcoming collection, is a really interesting and timely piece, unusual in many ways and powerful throughout. The story closely follows a woman, never named and always referred to only as "the woman," who has been raped - by a somewhat prominent person whom she met on a dating app - and who becomes his increasingly self-destructive stalker. What gives the story its topicality and much of its interest is that that "the woman" works in "content management" for "the world's largest search engine company," obviously Google; MS gives us a real sense of what daily work is like for the minions of the high-tech industry, in particular those in this seemingly innocuous job, which as it happens requires that they spend their working days - they are by the way all "contractors" rather than employees - scouring suspect sites and posts and searches for pornography, terrorist threats, brutality, etc., and we can only imagine how such a profession distorts the lives of so many, then disposes of the: the burnout and turnover rate is exceptionally high, and there's no corporate ladder to climb. They're in the pit.

Second, nearing the end of Ben Lerner's ambitious and mostly successful novel The Topeka School (2019), in which he grapples with his family history, his home town, and his thoughts and fears and agonies of his teenage self. It's hard not to think of this work as in the vein of autofiction, change of names aside (the protagonist is Adam, for ex.), as most of the key biographical facts check out: Notably, Lerner like Adam is the son of psychologists from a major medical center in Topeka; Lerner was a prodigy and, like his protagonist, won a national forensics prize while en route to Brown; Lerner's mother, like Adam's, wrote a breakout, best-selling book on psychotherapy; and so forth. Lerner's smart gambit is to tell this story through multiple narrators; had the entire story come from Adam's POV he would I think be insufferable, but shifting viewpoints allows him to give us multiple pathways into the story, and probably more info that a single narrator would be able to credibly provide (such as the sections on his parents' courtship and their various infidelities). The danger, however, is that at time the narrative feels confused and fractured or fragmented, particularly those passages about the social misfit Derren, w/ which Lerner teases us at the outset and whose tragic story trails along beside the prodigies and high achievers in the rest of the narrative without really giving full scope to D's life and sufferings. Perhaps Lerner will resolve the Derren material in the final chapters. But at least to this point this novel is rich in material (the excellent first chapter appeared in the New Yorker and I posted on it at that time) and is far less solipsistic than his previous novels.