Leaving The Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner | Review

"I would publish a book of poems and then a book of translations and I would come home as a celebrated author imbued with Iberian mystery."

Ben Lerner’s debut novel is an alluring personal journey which, for all of its lofty meditations, is compellingly readable. It is a semi-autobiographical portrait of Adam Gordon, a young American who has been awarded a poetry fellowship in Madrid. Adam languidly spends his days smoking, drinking, reading and generally blending in with his artistic Madrileño pals. Some would say that Adam is an anti-hero but he is endearing too. Of course, he is careless and at times frustrating in his lethargy, but I found this fitting in a novel where the sweltering beauty of Madrid serves as our backdrop.

An irresistible argument for Adam’s role as the anti-hero in the traditional Russian sense was proposed by James Wood in his 2011 The New Yorker review of the novel. For Wood, Adam is a descendant of the frustrated anti-heroes of Russian greats such as Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev. This is due to his leisurely ‘reading of Tolstoy and Cervantes, attending parties, downing tranquilizers, smoking hash, trying and failing to love and be loved by two Spanish women, and dodging the head of the foundation that has funded his sojourn.’ For Wood, Adam is not dissimilar to Lermontov’s Pechorin, the duelling, scheming raconteur in A Hero of Our Time. ‘Like Pechorin, Adam is sometimes emotionless but is also abruptly changeable - sometimes oddly histrionic, and at other moments oddly passive.’

A key theme of the novel is Adam’s battle with his own fraudulence and whether he will ever achieve authenticity in not only his poetry but also in his life. He speaks Spanish well, and is self-deprecating in how he perceives his proficiency to speak the language with his native friends. Adam’s self-doubt leads him to oscillate between the two contrasting ideas that he is merely a presumptive American and that, in fact, his soul may actually belong to Spain. As Jenny Turner has written in The Guardian, Adam can never truly elude himself from this idea that he is a privileged foreigner: ‘he really hates the would-be expatriate intellectuals… because he is one of them himself.’

Some of the novel’s best passages consist of Adam’s reflections upon whether his experience in Madrid signifies merely a period of time in his life as a year of self-exploration, or the beginning of his installation as an authentic inhabitant of Spain. Is this pursuit of authenticity futile or will it bestow rewards that he could never have envisaged? It is the ambiguity we are left with which makes the novel so compelling.

In many ways, the hints that Lerner leaves as the novel draws to a close is fitting for a writer who defies convention in taking a cerebral approach to his protagonist, yet produces beautifully light prose. You will struggle to find a better distillation of this ability of Lerner’s than in reading Wood’s The New Yorker article: ‘Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and “conflict'' fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life.’

The deliberations over fraudulence are not exclusive to Adam’s perceptions of authenticity. The novel is also deeply focused on communication and language. Through Adam’s relationships, his never becoming fluent in Spanish is central to the intrigue people have towards him: ‘how long I could remain in Madrid without crossing whatever invisible threshold of proficiency would render me devoid of interest’, Adam ponders during a trip to Granada. The ‘creature of privilege and lassitude’, Adam is immensely candid through the acknowledgment of his own inhibitions.

It is Adam’s transient meditations that make him so deeply human, allowing us to relate to him despite his very specific, intellectual awakening. It is the internal extrapolation of how he computes his hopes and dreams on foreign soil which makes the novel moving and leaves a wholly original impression on us upon the novel's conclusion.

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