I decided to try Leaving the Atocha Station after hearing Maureen Corrigan read her review of it a couple of months ago on NPR’s “Fresh Air with Terry Gross” Listen

Corrigan concluded that it was “flip, hip, smart, and very funny” and “unlike any other novel-reading experience I’ve had for a long time.” I believed her and liked her review, so I bought the book and read it. I concur with her enthusiasm. I liked Leaving the Atocha Station so much that even though its author, Ben Lerner, a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, doesn't post on OS, I wanted to plug it here anyway, if only because Flavorpill called it “the coolest indie press book going around right now.” The book started “going around” soon after it was published last year.

Flavorpill? A self-described “daily guide to quality cultural events in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and London.” Sounds pretty cool itself: http://flavorpill.com

I read the book last week.

Coffee House Press, its publisher, includes blurbs on its website from many of the reviews of Lerner's book. Here's one I especially like:

“. . .Leaving the Atocha Station is as much an apologia for poetry as it is a novel. Lerner’s ability to accomplish both projects at once is a marvel. His sense of narrative forward motion and his penchant for rumination are kept in constant competition with one another, so that neither is allowed to keep the upper hand for long. Leaving the Atocha Station is a novel for poets, liars, and equivocators—that is, for aspects of us all. It is also a poem, dedicated to the gulf between self and self–ego and alter ego, “true me” and “false me,” present self and outgrown past.”—Open Letters Monthly

Now I'll give you some observations of my own. Lerner's protagonist is Adam Gordon, a young poet on a Fullbright scholarship whose wanderings through the streets of Madrid reminded me of my own wanderings in Paris and Barcelona 34 years earlier pretending to be a writer and trying to fathom life and trying to be cool. Big difference between us is that Gordon is brilliant. He understands his narcissism and deploys it to what he hopes is his advantage. This means he can also laugh at himself.

Like when he attends an upscale party and realizes he's woefully outclassed :

As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe. There were a lot of handsome people in the sweeping white-carpeted living room with minimalist furniture and monumental paintings on the carefully lit walls.

Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile.

I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings. A look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null.

The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.

There. Now you don't have to read the book. Actually, you do. Remember what Flavorpill said.