An ornately sculpted, highly enjoyable, and sometimes infuriatingly opaque novel-shaped object. I call it that because the more I think about it the less it seems like a "novel" as a straightforward story. You can definitely retroactively extract a story from the book — one about the diverging high school years of debate-club twerp Adam Gordon and his maladjusted classmate Darren Eberheart in 1990s Topeka — but the text's division into sections pegged to different protagonists (Adam, Darren, Adam's parents Jonathan and Jane) both scrambles the chronology and diffuses the center of narrative interest, for instance by giving us a long section where Jonathan is telling us about his upbringing as a diplomat's son in an East Asian country.
The artfulness of the book then consists in Lerner's engineering acumen in stress-testing "story": how much he can pull things together and make them seem interesting (instead of just random or boring) after pushing them apart. And I think two things work in his favour. The first is that he really has a strong gift for deep, convincing storytelling. Both of Adams' parents' stories are enthralling, and Lerner is very attentive to nitty-gritty sociological detail about, for instance, the social mores of toxic suburban white boys or the depressing environment of a retirement community.
