How could Adam establish romantic intimacy when he saw such intimacy as “enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation”? How would Adam, who believed the self to be “one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it,” actually go about the task of building a self? In its attention to the consequences of real ideas on real experience, Leaving the Atocha Station proved itself to be not just a farcical romp but something more substantial. Yet what made Leaving the Atocha Station so remarkable was how, even while it mocked theory, it also took theory’s claims seriously, exploring how they might influence and warp the texture of an actual life. Other recent novels have drawn attention to the silly posturing of literary theory-think The Marriage Plot-but none did it so well as Lerner’s. All the elements of a comic masterpiece were there: the absurdity of a young American poet named Adam Gordon smoking, worrying, and deconstructing his way through a fellowship in Spain the lazy aimlessness of the novel’s plot the casual tone the quotable lines (“the flattering light of the subjunctive”). Here was a poet trying his hand at the fiction game and enjoying every minute of it. Leaving the Atocha Station was Lerner’s first novel-he had previously published three collections of poetry-and, at first glance, it seemed more a lark than anything else.
In Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), Ben Lerner sought to answer a single question: what would life be like if we lived it, truly and deeply, through the lens of critical theory and post-structuralism?
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