Book review: Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (2011)

The only problem with this otherwise stunning novel is its narrow scope, although the political realities of Spain, where the novel is set, are alive within the narrative through the beliefs of certain characters that Lerner creates. The book describes a year in the life of an American poet living in Madrid on a literary fellowship. (Lerner himself writes poetry and spent a year living on Madrid on a Fullbright fellowship.)

The title refers to the 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid that killed hundreds of people. Adam Gordon, the novel’s poet-protagonist, had travelled to Granada on a train that he and a woman named Isabel had caught at the same station. The trip was cut short by Adam’s strange temperament – he gets angry for unspecified reasons at unpredictable moments and takes his anger out on the people around him. He also smokes a lot of hashish in the book but never seems to consider how this habit might adversely affect his mental health. As well as being mostly romantically inept he’s actually a bit of a mess and, later in Barcelona, gets lost for a whole day after just going out for a coffee from the hotel he and another woman, Theresa, are staying in.

But apart from the psychotic elements, which are really just flaws in an otherwise fully-formed but rather banal modern character, the real poetry of the novel resides in its study of the texture of time, as Nabokov formulated the problem in the 1960s. The way that people move from tonic moment to tonic moment, smoothing over the emotional cracks that open up between signal events in their lives, is explored. To accompany this theme there is a running debate in the book about Adam giving up smoking, something that he likes to do because it helps him, he thinks, to navigate these interstices between things.

These “gaps” in lived existence become irrelevant only at moments of increased social drama, such as during the protests that take place after the bombings. In such an arena, Adam glides purposefully from encounter to encounter, though still intent on his current romance, and the way that people come alive in his life at this time mirrors the sense, that he generates throughout the novel, that he is special. There is always a sense of him looking in at himself speaking and interacting with people, and this kind of artifice (sometimes pure fakery, in Adam’s case) is somehow absolved by the real drama of the attacks and their aftermath.

They turn out to be for Adam a benediction of sorts. The novel shows that it’s only moments of heightened drama that live up to the register that regulates our emotional lives. Getting through the downtime is everyone’s challenge, and Adam’s drug-taking is emblematic of this truth.

But Adam also has a strange need at different times to lie to other people in order to dramatize his life so as to make himself more interesting in their eyes. He almost sabotages his relationship with Isabel in this way, and does a similar thing with Theresa, who turns out however to be a sophisticated person as well as a translator of literature. Adam is projecting himself in society. Near the end of the book Theresa appears at a poetry reading that Adam is involved in and he wonders how he didn’t know that she had been invited to be on the same panel as he was.

Adam plays with his own persona, as an American living in Spain, but while everyone in their everyday lives does what he does, and amplify in their minds certain parts of their personalities in order to achieve certain effects in their relations with others, not everyone goes as far as to lie to their friends to get the desired result. The barrier of language that Adam faces gets lower with time and by the end of the story his speech is for most purposes indistinguishable from that of a Spaniard.

What this novel reminded me most strongly of were the brilliant novels of Edmund White published in the 1980s, although Adam (and, presumably, Lerner) is not gay but rather determinedly heterosexual. The politics of sex are sumptuously on offer in this brilliant novel, as they are in White’s novels, along with the ways that people create narratives to accompany the flow of their own thoughts and perceptions of the world, winding stories around the things that they see, think, and feel in an effort to make sense of life and also to negotiate the thickets of the relationships that they forge with other people in the communities they live in.

While this novel offers a coherent vision for its chief characters you sometimes feel like slapping Adam in the face and telling him not to be so selfish, although you have to keep in mind that he is living with a mental illness and that this circumstance is always a barrier he has to overcome in his diurnal rounds.

For the main part, the machinery the author uses to get ideas and feelings across the barrier to other people’s minds is adequate to the task at hand but on occasion the fabric of the narrative starts to fray and tear, threatening to fail. Such passages might have been written longer. It is always a goal of a competent author to seek the most efficient expression in order to carry things over to the reader, but in Lerner’s case there are times when this dictum wears thin, and in some places in the narrative you wish that he had spent a few more paragraphs or a few more sentences on the task of making meaning.

But overall the fictional vistas that open up after you have read this book seem more expansive, freer and more inviting. Just as Nabokov planted the seed that Lerner would later nurture so that it could grow into a flourishing thing, other writers in the future will want to come along and use the innovations that Lerner has put into print in order to enrich society and make it more suitable for its inhabitants.