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In 2014, in London for a bookfair, I found myself at dinner with an English editor who expressed his admiration of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I had read it not long before for an essay I’d been drawn into writing on W. G. Sebald’s influence on the contemporary novel, and the thundering praise heaped upon it puzzled me. When I inquired as to what the editor had liked about it, he mused, “I just thought it was very funny, you know. How pretentious the main character is, but how he’s always undermining his own pretension.” I asked the man for his favorite joke. He said he couldn’t remember.
This is captious, but illustrative, of an aspect of what a future biographer will call Lerner’s “meteoric rise.” The most famous literary writers acclaimed him; he won the MacArthur “genius grant”; the New York Times crowned him “the most talented writer of his generation.” And yet, when one digs into reviews from the period in search of substance, it is hard to find much to hold onto. Even James Wood falls into the art-museum-placard trap of gesturing toward an aesthetic task as though insinuation were tantamount to accomplishment. Leaving the Atocha Station, he writes, is “about communication and translation, about what can be truthfully expressed,” about poetry, about a young man “measuring his failure and fraudulence.”
