Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Artist as Snowflake

An American language-student is in Madrid on somebody else’s dime, living in a paradise of lethargy, artsy natives, and drugs. He is an intellectual fantasist; somewhat autistic when it comes to poetry; and somewhat narcissistic about everything else. He also has a young person’s discernment about what is important, which is to say none at all.

He claims to be engaged in ‘research.’ But since he lies, it’s not clear what this could mean. In fact there is more than a little of Patricia Highsmith’s Mr. Ripley throughout the entire book. The narrator/protagonist is a practised fraud whose instinctive reaction to any situation is to scam. Even when zoned out on weed and booze, he can calculate and perform.

The difference from Highsmith is that she had a story. Lerner has a string of events that simply go on and on in a flood of indirect speech filled with myopic detail. Paragraph after page-long paragraph of ‘this happened, then that happened, then I smoked another splif.’ If this is about finding one’s artistic bearings, I suggest someone has slipped him a bum map with his hash. Pretentious and tedious nonsense - clearly this is part of a new literature I cannot understand.

View all my reviews