6/11/2023 0 Comments Atocha station ben lernerNeither is autobiographical in any straightforward sense: 10:04 focuses on a single man’s plan to get a platonic friend pregnant, while the real Lerner had been happily married for years. Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) features a callow American poet lounging around Madrid on a Fulbright scholarship (as Lerner once did) 10:04 (2014) incorporates some of Lerner’s art criticism and a magazine story he published, and opens with the narrator and his agent celebrating the “strong six figure” advance he’s received for the novel you’re reading. Lerner turned to fiction only after publishing three volumes of poetry (the second, Angle of Yaw, got him shortlisted for a National book award in 2006), and his novels share a disarming, conversational tone, a taste for collage, and a playful attitude to the line between life and art – a line poets have never been called on to respect. We had met to discuss his new book, The Topeka School, the third and most intricate in his acclaimed trilogy of novels featuring a Lerner-like character named Adam Gordon, and yet it wasn’t easy to tell who was interviewing whom. W andering around a Vija Celmins retrospective at the Met Breuer gallery in Manhattan with the poet-turned-novelist Ben Lerner, I sensed that I had walked into a trap.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |