Ben Lerner is on the bleeding edge of fiction. Reading The Topeka School is like dangling over the side of a cliff, dizzy with the vast expanse of open space, wondering how you got there when you were supposed to be in Kansas. At the same time, this is Lerner's most grounded book, aware of the tension between its unabashed excess and its ultimate simplicity. In a book that is basically about growing up, Lerner manages to take us to the very heart of language and back again. The book brings readers a place (Topeka) where language has settled like silt at the bottom of an unfiltered glass and an age (the end of childhood) where everybody knows that they have to stir it up again. Adam Gordon, a returning protagonist, is afraid of migraines—and just knows that he’s going to give himself one, no matter what he does.

Above all, this book is funny in the same way that all of Lerner's novels are funny. At times, the book leans in to the sensations of dread that accompany its linguistic innovations: the debate-stage Spread, obscure Herman Hesse stories about the subconscious incoherence of human language, smoking meth out of a lightbulb in your parents' basement—but all of these experiences are presented in situations that, once you take a step back and look at what the characters are doing, are totally absurd (taking too much acid in the Met, sneaking into the wrong house while trying not to wake up the family, freestyling in the lily-white Kansas suburbs).

There is some real terror in the book, too: Adam's mom, when she has her own Hesse-fueled experiences, discovers real trauma in her past, and has to grapple with an irresponsible and uncaring family. A lighthearted rhyme, the career-destroying "Purple Cow," carries a surprising amount of emotional heft as Adam discovers his mother's anguish and fear bound up in her ability to keep the Gordon family together with a bedtime ritual. It's only natural that Gordon ends up as a poet later on, mixing the fiction with Lerner's biography (the boundaries have always been blurry).

The pill has a paradoxical effect. The speaker is still moving her lips, counting things on her fingers, but I can’t hear her speech. At first, all I hear is the blood moving through my head, the hiss of quiet piping, like a barely perceptible Muzak. It is spreading out from the stage into the Mall of America and the Summerset Home and Rolling Hills and the Hypermart and the Foundation and the Dillon’s on Huntoon. The white noise at the end of history. Unintelligible, if shaped.

Fans of Lerner’s previous novels will find, in The Topeka School, a lot to love, and maybe a lot that will throw them off. This is not, really, more of the same, which is a strength and a weakness. As a trilogy with Atocha Station and 10:04, Topeka School can stand alone but basically assumes close intimacy with the Adam Gordon of the earlier novels. In a series of books that point to the future, to the novelty that springs from a clean break with the past (even as you grapple with and overcome it), The Topeka School is ambivalent: is there a way forward? In the end, it rests with the reader. Whether that's a self-conscious coup for reader agency or an author's cop-out is for you to decide.