Coffee House Press, 186 pages, trade paperback, $16.00

Critical acclaim and my love for a book have oftentimes been diametrically opposed things. For example, the Nobel Prize in Literature has echoed my tastes on very rare occasions. In 1998 they gave it José Saramago, one of my favorite authors as a teenager. The year after, they picked Gunter Grass, and I still feel like someone owes me the money I spent on The Flounder. In the case of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the buzz surrounding the book was so loud it almost turned me off. Almost every respected newspaper out there had thrown an award covered in seemingly hyperbolic adjectives its way. I finally decided to read. To my surprises, some of those newspapers had left good things unsaid.

This somewhat autobiographical novel follows Adam Gordon, a young, talented, and very unreliable American poet who’s in Madrid working on his poetry thanks to a prestigious fellowship. Instead of researching, writing, and learning the language, Adam spends his time pondering the meaning of art, trying to find himself, and smoking weed. As relationships come and go and Madrid erupts in sociopolitical turmoil after the 2004 train bombings, Adam opts to stay in the sidelines and deconstruct art and its relationship to truth and worries about the impossibility of ever having a “profound experience of art.” The plethora of experiences and struggles he has faced, along with an uncertain future back in the States, all come into play as Adam’s time in Madrid comes to an end. Even then, he turns to philosophy and thought in order to escape the fact that he has to make a decision.

The best thing about Leaving the Atocha Station is that it’s a celebration of language. Lerner is a successful poet, and his love for words and their meanings is on full display here. Since Adam’s Spanish is far from perfect, he’s pushed into situations in which interpreting a situation (by reading facial/body language and simply imagining what’s being said) are his only options. Despite the tension this causes, the author presents these instances with a touch of humor that makes them a treat. That same sense of humor is used to filter most arguments and plenty of Adam’s reflections on art. The result is a novel that’s intelligent and witty while also having its vinegary and uncomfortable moments.

Despite its hip, modern flavor and humor, the narrative itself is not the book’s most remarkable accomplishment. The two achievements that push Leaving the Atocha Station into must-read territory are its antihero narrator and the almost kinetic nature of its prose. Somehow, Lerner manages to make readers like his ostensibly unlikable main character. Adam Gordon is smart and charming at times, but he’s also shallow, deeply self-absorbed, and a pathological liar. Still, something about him makes you like him. Also, the beauty and force of Lerner’s prose keeps you turning pages despite the story’s lack of a plot. Adam comes and goes, lies and kisses a few women, walks in the park, smokes hashish and pops a few pills, but that’s about it. In lieu of a plot, the author fills the pages with an electric, commanding prose that turns into everything the reader needs.

Lerner is the author of three critically acclaimed books of poetry and was a Fulbright Scholar in Spain and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In other words, this is an autobiography poorly disguised as a novel. While we’ll never know why Lerner chose the novel format instead of the autobiography route, the end result is a book that deserves to be read and that is actually worthy of all the praise that came its way.