One
and possibly two good things came
of
my not knowing then
that Jonathan
Franzen had given Leaving
the Atocha Station
a two-eyebrows-up recommendation. The good things are sequentially
related. First, solely because Maureen Corrigan praised
Ben Lerner's debut novel as "one
of the most compelling books about nothing I've ever read,"
I read it. Then (a word smarmy, smug Jonathan Franzen preemptively
scolds
any serious writer
for
using)
because
I so liked Leaving
the Atocha Station,
I've
since, upon learning of his endorsement,
decided to break my lifelong shunning
of anything
by
Franzen and read one of his goddam books.
No
doubt it was sheer cosmic cooperation back in 2011 that shielded me
from knowing the novelist New York Times literary assassin Michiko
Kakutani reduces to choking,
self-pitying sobs whenever he
so much as begins
to associate something
with
her
had deigned to bless Leaving
the Atocha Station.
Nor can I rule out the possibility knowing one of Kakutani's favorite
whipping boys had shone
his tepid countenance upon Leaving
the Atocha Station
wouldn't have preempted
my
welcoming such
Corrigan exuberance as “flip, hip, smart, and very funny” and
“unlike any other novel-reading experience I’ve had for a long
time,” and then
(haha, Franzen,
you pusillanimous pecksniff)
going
on to say Flavorpill,
a
self-described “daily guide to [high]
quality
cultural events in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Chicago, Miami, and London.,"
had anointed Leaving
the Atocha Station
as “the coolest indie press book going around right now.” Franzen
schmanzen,
I mean who doesn't want
to
be seen
as cool
by
those who count?
And
Lerner was already a National Book Award finalist in poetry. Solid
literary creds, probly why Franzen
wheezed and scrabbled his way onto
the Lerner
bandwagon--they
even look a little alike. Had I known this
then...nah, I'd have read it anyway. I've
always pretty much trusted Corrigan (despite her having once praised
a Franzen novel--every human's entitled, we are told, to occasionally
err). I
shall
probably
always
detest Jonathan Franzen,
on strictly intuitive principles,
but, then
(yeah, hahahahaha)
he was right about Lerner, so...
So
what's so hot about Leaving
the Atocha Station?
I'm
giving
you some links to professional opinions.
In a
New
York Times review
novelist Gary
Sernovitz insightfully
compares
Lerner's
novel
with Hemingway's debut, American
expatriot
classic The
Sun Also Rises.
Sernovitz calls Leaving
"a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a
precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing
study of what it’s like to be a young American abroad." (I
figure anyone who uses a word like bildungsroman
as easily as, say, then,
is no one to mess with.) And Sernovitz adds that Adam Gordon
(Lerner's answer to Hemingway's Jake Barnes),
"a poet, having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Madrid,
makes friends, struggles with Spanish, smokes hash, wanders around,
writes poetry, doubts poetry and has two low-energy love affairs."
No
bullfights, no stoic, macho triumphs or beautiful final lines like
"isn't it pretty to think so." It
does have
the kind of spectacular
drama
a Jake Barnes would
have waded into,
flinging subtly charged monosyllables
at all the right moments:
the terrorist bombing of Madrid's main
train station,
but
Adam Gordon can't summon enough concern to give
it
much of a hoot. It's even doubtful the Atocha bombing has more than a
coincidental name-recognition link to the book's title, which the pro
critics say more than likely relates
to a
nasty little poem by the hugely celebrated
(among the entendring patriciate)
post-post-post-post...(not
sure how many we need here)...modern
poet John Ashbery. Here
are the first few lines should you think I'm being unfair with the
"nasty":
LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
by John Ashbery
The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness
And pulling us out of there experiencing it
he meanwhile ... And the fried bats they sell there
dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds...
Other people ... flash
the garden are you boning
and defunct covering ... Blind dog expressed royalties
comfort of your perfect tar grams nuclear world bank tulip
Favorable to near the night pin
loading formaldehyde. the table torn from you
Suddenly and we are close
Mouthing the root when you think
generator homes enjoy leered
The worn stool blazing pigeons from the roof
driving tractor to squash
Leaving the Atocha Station steel
infected bumps the screws
everywhere wells
abolished top ill-lit
scarecrow falls Time, progress and good sense
strike of shopkeepers dark blood
no forest you can name drunk scrolls
the completely new Italian hair ...
Baby ...
Catch
the drift? I'm no poet,
obviously,
and knowing this connection, the Ashbery one, and that Lerner himself
was a celebrated poet presumably of that
ilk, might have helped
with the insipid Franzen's endorsement to steer
me away from this
novel. So
glad
I was ignorant of all that,
and while
I seriously doubt I will ever read any of Lerner's poetry--even
the collection he's archly titled I
Hate Poetry
(the poems therein
I suspect intended
for academics,
dilettantes,
and other post-post-post, etc. modern poets)--I
would with hungry anticipation read another novel of his were he to
write one.
 |
| pecksniff |
Leaving
Atocha Station
carried me back to my own youthful
wanderings
in Paris and Barcelona pretending to be a writer and romantically
presuming to
fathom life and trying
desperately
to be cool. The
essential
difference between us
(me
and Adam Gordon)
is that Gordon is brilliant. He understands his narcissism and uses
it to what he hopes is his advantage. This means he can 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 whit-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.
Coffee
House Press,
Lerner's
publisher, includes blurbs on its website from many review's
of
his
book. One
I especially like,
from Open
Letters Monthly,
says, “.
. . 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.”
Wish
I could grasp
good writing that
way and discuss it as intelligently.
Wish I could write prose
like
Lerner's.
Franzen?
That
insufferably
overrated,
Kakutani-whipped, sob-sister prima donna? We'll
see.
More
links to excellent reviews:
[find
more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly
eclectic blog:
