5/13/2023 0 Comments The atocha station![]() But the real action of the novel is interior. Adam Gordon, 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. It is also a revealing study of what it’s like to be a young American abroad. LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION (Coffee House Press, paper, $15), Ben Lerner’s remarkable first novel, published last year, is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It also affects how it feels to be an American, which is a central concern of American novelists. But whether America is leading from - or falling - behind affects more than our foreign policy. ![]() When an adviser to President Obama was quoted in The New Yorker as saying that the administration’s policy in Libya was “leading from behind,” he initiated a season of hand-wringing about American decline, as if he had announced that the president was implementing a secret plan to make a second-rate country even worse. ![]()
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