Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely. Poetry actively repelled my attention, it was opaque and thingly and refused to absorb me; its articles and conjunctions and prepositions failed to dissolve into a feeling and a speed; you could fall into the spaces between words as you tried to link them up; and yet by refusing to absorb me the poem held out the possibility of a higher form of absorption of which I was unworthy, a profound experience unavailable from within the damaged life, and so the poem became a figure for the outside. It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at least a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. So after I'd dismissed the Quixote, eaten, jacked off, read some Tolstoy, I carried what was left of the wine and an anthology of contemporary Spanish poetry onto the roof and read a few poems by what was left of the light.

Adam Gordon is an American poet on fellowship in Madrid. He tells people that he's there to study, and write poetry about, the effects of the Spanish Civil War. His Spanish is a little rusty, and he's addicted to what he calls "little white pills"; a combination which can have unfortunate consequences, as when he's unable to stop smiling as a woman tells a clearly upsetting story he does not comprehend, which leads to someone punching him in the face. The punch itself is not so bad, honestly; it has an immediacy and a recognizable quality of experience that is different from what really torments Adam, which is the anguish of his own interiority: the distance from experience, the inability to communicate, and the uselessness of words.

Why not stay at home, someone asks him, and write about the United States of Bush? Why come to Spain and write poetry about their fascists? But Adam's fellowship in Spain, we come to understand, is not actually an attempt to face history and experience but to flee from them. His bad Spanish is not actually a problem to be overcome but a safety net. He can utter half-formed sentences and others--especially women--will supply the missing meaning, allowing him to seem in profound or mystical. When he fails to understand the motivations or needs of others, he can blame it on the difficulty of translation; when he is frightened of being understood himself he can retreat into it. Translation in Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a kind of metaphor for the whole experience of postmodern life, and its difficulties legitimize alienation and loneliness.

Adam speaks in the language of critical theory:

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where "poem" is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality's unavailability.

I had a hard time with Atocha at first because I couldn't figure out of this was wholly sincere or if it was parody. Who talks like that? Ultimately, I decided that the answer was both: Adam's alienation and general sad-sackery are real, and the language is both an attempt to make sense of it and to push it away. It wouldn't work at all if it weren't combined with a narrative heavy on farce: Adam, for example, courts sympathy by telling women his mother has died, and then when he accidentally brings her up in conversation, invents a half-dozen other pointless lies instead of coming clean. Language won't really allow us to come clean, Adam seems to tell himself, and while that may be true it doesn't explain why he's such a piece of shit half the time.

The book clicked for me about a third of the way through when Adam hears a story from a friend, by way of text, about an accidental drowning in Mexico. It's somehow both shocking and funny: Lerner's rendition of the text chain is one of the most accurate uses of modern technology I've ever seen in a novel, and it's incredibly pathetic. (How can you tell a story like that when each party has to stop every few lines to say "you still there?") And of course later on Adam steals the horrible story and tells it like it's his own to impress a girl. But the drowning, even filtered through technological hearsay, is the interruption of postmodern alienation by the real.

The same thing happens in the book's late stages when Adam finds himself in the middle of the Madrid train bombings of 2004. What can a poet do to affect history? Probably nothing, Adam admits on a panel, half gleefully because it absolves him of the attempt--but history, reality, experience, violence, these things keep appearing in your life whether your critical apparatus is prepared for them or not. A novel about terrorism and critical theory seems like it ought to be a real drag. It's a credit to Lerner, who is clearly only separated from Adam by the thinnest shade, that Leaving the Atocha Station is both funny and affecting.