In this light Adam’s obsession with self-presentation takes on a new cast: He’s representing what a man in his situation would look like, what someone like him would be like-without the ambition of being that man, but merely of referencing him. For example, a John Ashbery poem is most successful not when it makes sense, exactly, but when it references sense, when in reading you feel “the arc and feel of thinking” and therefore are able to “experience your experience.” The rhythm of the thought, not the thought itself, is the great art. As Adam sees it, art enables one to experience the movement or “texture” of time. At the heart of the book is a rather deep discussion of the function of art. He spends a tremendous amount of time arranging his face into appropriate positions, pretending to take notes when people are watching, and reciting memorized phrases-all in the hope of seeming intelligent.Īnd he is intelligent. He believes he might have no talent, that he received the grant due to the false ways he presents himself to others.

He fears that he is a fraud and that his fraudulence will be detected. The bulk of the book is about Adam’s wild insecurity. Adam grumbles that “nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is,” and that the “soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire’s packaged tours.”

Typically, the expat novel is the ideal petri dish for an isolated protagonist to confront him- or herself in a lonely search for authenticity (think of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano), but as Lerner knows, that quest has become cliché. It is a quintessential modernist expat novel: Adam does very little but walk from celebrated place to celebrated place, brooding, doubting himself, half-understanding what’s said to him, and being increasingly ugly to the people around him.

Leaving the Atocha Station tells the story of Adam, a poet on a prestigious yearlong fellowship in Madrid. Ben Lerner’s first novel, coming on the heels of three outstanding poetry collections, is a darkly hilarious examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be.

Atocha station novel