Leaving the Atocha Station [Paperback]

Ben Lerner is a highly regarded young American poet. 'Leaving the Atocha Station' - the title is taken from a poem by John Ashbery, whom Lerner admires - is his first novel. Set around the time of the Madrid bombings in 2004, it recounts a few months in the life of Adam Gordon, a young American poet who has been awarded a writing scholarship in Spain. Adam is struggling: with doubts about his ability as a poet; with his relationships with women; with the Spanish language; with the question of whether to return to the States or pursue a new life in Spain; with drugs prescribed and unprescribed. The common factor is his sense of mediacy: of being in transit and yet without a defined goal, of being separated from his own experiences in a way that renders them null.

'Leaving the Atocha Station' has been highly praised by reviewers, but left me with a distinct sense of dissatisfaction. The novel of a young man's education in life is a firmly established genre, and certain types of cliché have become hard to avoid, but Lerner seems actively to court some of the worst. In particular, the reader's investment in the story is likely to turn on his or her response to the central character. Lerner is alive to Adam's selfishness and self-absorption, his casual cruelty and mythomanic propensities, and it may be that these qualities were intended to come across as essentially comic - especially as they rarely achieve the results Adam intends - but the abiding impression was of a highly privileged young man who might serve as a living exemplar of the American term 'ingrate'.

Characters that are hard to admire in life may nonetheless prove compelling in narrative. But Lerner never managed to make me care about Adam's intransitive state or his possible futures. He isn't a 'beau monstre'; merely a morally compromised person who, we are unconvincingly assured late in the book, is for all his doubts actually a good poet.

Lerner has taken on some large targets here - the nature and function of art, the mediated nature of almost all of contemporary experience, the relationship between art and politics - but seems to have little new or interesting to say about any of these things. Adam, his consciousness permanently blurred by his erratic drug intake and the interactions between his prescribed medication and the street drugs he uses habitually, loses himself in repetitive speculations about mediacy that aim at profundity but impressed me only as dryly solipsistic. It's never a good sign when a reader becomes impatient with a character in a book as short as this.

A further surprise was that Lerner evinces no particularly striking command of language here. The 'poet's novel' - long on surprising uses of words, short on plot and character - has itself become a cliché, but Lerner really offers nothing out of the way; much of the most powerful language here is in the form of quotations. Since this is a book in which very little 'happens', and which is dominated by Adam's internal monologue, some relief at the level of the word and sentence would have been welcome.

I hesitated before awarding this novel a third star, but this is a young man's writing, literate - which is increasingly unusual - and not actively bad. Readers who want to see what Ben Lerner can really do with words would do better at present to investigate his poetry.

I took the review of this book from the Times and thought it sounded like something i would generally enjoy reading. I found the book tedious and boring, and actually found myself wishing the % away on the kindle! Somehow i could not give up on it, but i felt as though i was endlessly waiting for either something to happen or some blinding insight about one (or any) of the (cold and unlikeable) characters. Full of accounts which go nowhere, self indulgent ramblings and endless text about smoking, drinking, taking tablets and telling lies. I am not sure what the point was to this novel. Inaccessible, utterly depressing and did little for me i am afraid. Maybe the author is a better poet than writer.

Adam is a young American poet on a fellowship in Madrid in 2004. He has been funded to work on a poem about the Spanish Civil War but he confesses that he knows nothing about the history of the country and his Spanish is not proficient enough for the task he has set himself. He spends most of his time avoiding contact with the foundation that has funded him, partying with young Madrileños and taking drugs. He seems unable to exist without copious prescription pills, hash, weed, nicotine, caffeine and alcohol.

Adam is the unreliable narrator par excellence. He continually lies to his companions, adopts anecdotes from others as his own, claims that his Spanish is poor but seems to manage in some complex situations. He is fooling the other characters in the book as well as the reader. He is exceedingly egotistic and self-referential. Even when discussing the Madrid terrorist bombings his first thoughts are for his own relationship with Teresa rather than the victims.

The cover of Leaving the Atocha Station is splashed with rave reviews: "luminously brilliant", "intensely and unusually brilliant", "seductively intelligent". I am sorry to say that much of the book left me cold. There were many funny incidents and reflections - like when he leaves his hotel in Barcelona to buy a coffee and (not knowing the name of the hotel) gets lost in the narrow streets for a whole day.

There are undoubtedly splashes of brilliance in this book but they verge on the "look how clever I am" type of writing. There is a very narrow line between brilliance and pretentiousness.....