In the earliest pages of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam expresses the self-conscious search for meaning that plagues him: I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art. What interests me, though, is the way these two components work together in both Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School, I want to identify the specific way Lerner's Adam interprets the world, and investigate how this might help us find a way to crawl out of (or, alternately, live within) "the void." Others, like Rebecca Walkowitz, have been drawn to the innovative way the novel presents the process of translation on the page, formally evoking polysemy and misunderstandings. Scholars such as Nicholas Dames and Alex Gallo-Brown have suggested that Leaving the Atocha Station's Adam is representative of an artist steeped too deeply in literary theory: well-educated but overly diagnostic, unable to connect with the people around him.
In Leaving the Atocha Station, we encounter an older Adam: an isolated, anxious twenty-something who, despite being on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid intended to inform his poetry, is quickly losing faith in the power of art. In The Topeka School, Adam is a renowned high-school debater and reticent yet budding poet, the emotionally-troubled son of psychologists desperate to put a narrative to the complicated events their family experiences.
The prose of these linked novels-part poetry, part literary criticism, part realist novel, and what reads like all confession-center upon a shared protagonist, Adam. Why is it that a single text can evoke a wide range of interpretations, and what does our interpretation-our experience of a text-say about who we are as people? Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station and recently released The Topeka School explore these questions by investigating the complicated processes of reading and reception that feed this void. In Ben Lerner's novels, we explore all three of these: language and also rage at its void-that is, the space between language and meaning, writer and reader, the poet's unfailing belief in the power of literature and his simultaneous, unshakable self-consciousness when language fails. "And now, to fill the void, came rage and language."
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