Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Early in this book, Ben Lerner explains how you're supposed to read this book. On page 19, talking about attempting to read Spanish prose, Lerner's narrator, Adam, reveals:

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

Since by page 19 it was already very clear to me that Leaving the Atocha Station would be rather short on plot, I understood that, according to Ben Lerner's terms, I wasn't supposed to care about that; I was supposed to be reading for the sense of "directionality."

So how does the book do on that front? Does it draw us in to Ben's (sorry, Adam's) life and make us feel as if we're there, experiencing the passage of time and its subtle variations along with Ben? Does it make us feel as if the small moments, rather than the big milestone events ("plot"), are the real stuff of life? Uh, no. To me this book felt very episodic, like a diary. A lot of it is internal. Ben (sorry, Adam) spends a lot of time thinking about writing; some of this is interesting and some of it is impossibly esoteric. He experiences problems with anxiety that seem like they're part of another book (a memoir about anxiety, perhaps). He bumbles around Madrid, trying to make friends even though his Spanish isn't good, with some humorous outcomes and some tedious ones. A terrorist attack happens and Adam describes some of the reactions of city residents, but makes no real effort to understand what they're feeling and seems to feel very little himself. A long instant-message conversation between Adam and a friend from home is by far the most riveting part of the book, but it just seems dropped in there, with no relation to anything else. There's not much connecting anything to anything, and I feel like you could shuffle these sections without significantly changing the overall impact of the book. So much for "the texture of time passing."

Whether he means to or not, Lerner offers an alternate way to read this book. Adam attends a poetry reading but isn't impressed by the first poet's work: Even though his Spanish isn't great, he can just tell the poems are filled with cliches. In order to attempt to enjoy them more, Adam tries approaching the poems in a different way:

I forced myself to listen as if the poem were unpredictable and profound, as if that were given somehow, and any failure to be compelled would be exclusively my own.

That pretty much sums up this book. If you approach it assuming it's meaningful, you'll find meaning here. If you approach it without assuming it's meaningful but waiting to be shown meaning, you'll probably be kept waiting. (Whether that failure is your own is something you can decide for yourself.)

Obviously, there's a trend now of writers publishing thinly veiled life stories and calling them novels. Little attempt is made to add lyricism or interpretation to these "novels" (indeed, if these things were added, they'd probably have to be called "memoirs"). This trend has produced novels good (Rachel Cusk's Outline), bad (I should probably stop picking on You're Not Much Use to Anyone, but I don't want to), and WTF (Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?). Leaving the Atocha Station isn't terrible, but it's not up there with the best of this new genre. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm spending all my time thinking about your artistic choices instead of getting lost in your book, you're doing something wrong.

So should you read this book? That depends--do you like asking yourself a lot of questions about what qualifies as a "novel" and what doesn't? Do you like asking yourself if something is meant to be meaningful even when it seems like it isn't? Do you like wondering if things are supposed to be funny or not? Honestly, I sometimes enjoy asking myself these questions, but I wouldn't want to have to do it all the time. So I'm curious to see where Lerner goes with his second novel, 10:04, but only the passing of time will reveal if this relationship is meaningful or just a phase.