Book reviews: Leaving The Atocha Station | The Jump Artist

By STUART KELLY
Published on 04/08/2012 03:50

BOTH these novels by new American authors come proclaiming their prizeworthy status: Lerner won The Believer Book Award and was shortlisted for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Ratner won the first Sami Rohr prize for Jewish Literature and was one of Publishers Weekly top ten debuts; both carry endorsements from authors such as Paul Auster and AD Miller and eminent critics such as James Wood and Charles Baxter.

Leaving The Atocha Station

By Ben Lerner

Granta, 272pp, £14.99

The Jump Artist

By Austin Ratner

Viking, 288pp, £12.99

Given how difficult the market is at the moment for new fiction, it is unsurprising that publishers would garland the books with every possible word of praise. Both Lerner’s Leaving The Atocha Station and Ratner’s The Jump Artist are accomplished, and both show a great deal of promise: neither, however, is flawless. Both books, broadly speaking, are about the meaning of being an artist in an age of terror.

The Jump Artist’s eponymous central character is the photographer Philippe Halsman, whose fame rests as much on his iconic images of Dali, Hitchcock, Cocteau, Churchill, Monroe and Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson as it does on the tragic circumstances of his early life.

In September 1928, while Halsman was on a hiking tour of the Austrian Alps, his father died in unclear circumstances. Philippe told the investigators his father had seemingly suffered a heart attack and fallen; however, the corpse had head injuries consistent with murder. He was charged and convicted of the murder, and spent four years in prison: Einstein (whom he later photographed), Thomas Mann and others lobbied for his release, which was eventually granted by the outgoing president.

The whole case is a kind of horrific prelude to the Nazi atrocities to come; it depended on, and actively encouraged, a suppurating streak of anti-Semitism in Austrian society. The early prison scenes, the appeal trial and Philippe’s first days after release are by far the strongest parts of the book. The latter sections rather run out of steam in comparison. Although a preface indicates that this is “an artistic tribute” to Halsman rather than a portrait, it almost eschews intruding on that most private of spaces, the artist’s aesthetic sense of his own vocation.

In prison Philippe meditates on masks and forms an emotional attachment to a kitten he teaches to jump, yet Halsman’s famous statement on his photographic “jumpology” – “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears”– is relegated almost to an afterthought. Halsman’s awful realisation that the photograph he treasured through his incarceration is actually dearer to him that the person in the photograph might have been the trigger to explore the use of surrealism in his work; instead it remains an unactivated theme.

That said, there is some truly beautiful writing in the novel, linked with an elliptical and acute approach to psychology. In prison, for example, we overhear “it wasn’t the machinery of justice that frightened Philippe most anymore, but the machinery of time, winding events among its cold coils, cogs, and spindles, winding many things into being all at once and all at once taking them back again, into the interstices of the machine, where everything vanished, never to be seen again or ever to be understood”. At moments like this, Ratner shows he has the kind of limber, subtle prose style that might lead to truly great things.

Linguistically, Leaving The Atocha Station is one of the most remarkable books I have read this year. Lerner is a poet, but this isn’t a “poetic novel”, by which I mean the kind of work where mellifluous description acts as a kind of literary toupée.

Lerner’s poetry manifests itself in elegantly stilted grammar, in contradiction and self-cancellation, in painfully self-aware self-mirroring (“as if beholding myself beholding”, “to experience your experience”, “a profound experience of the absence of profundity”), and especially in misunderstanding. The setting foregrounds this: Adam Gordon is a graduate student on a fellowship to Madrid, who is supposed to be working on becoming fluent in Spanish and writing a thesis on the impact of the civil war on Spanish poetry. He is also a bipolar stoner, whose real “research” involves self-medication and introspection. The camber of Adam’s thoughts is conveyed with astonishing grace: he feels “most intensely love for that other thing, the sound-absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance, although that’s not even close, the texture of et cetera itself”. At other points, he chemically avoids his role as “bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life”.

Politically savvy readers will have realised that that the Atocha Station of the title was the site of the 11 March terrorist attack in 2004. The terrorist attack is just another opportunity for feeling alienated: if there were a word for “unintentionally aggrandising by being deliberately un-self-aggrandising” it ought to have been invented here. It is to Lerner’s credit that the event, and Adam’s reaction to it, does not seem injected in for dramatic effect – he has established the extreme levels of self-absorption already – but it does not excuse that this is, eventually, “One Character In Search Of A Narrative”.

Anomie is interesting. Aimlessness is interesting. But aimless aimlessness is a snapshot, not a story; while a character may lack purpose, a novel without purpose is just prose on a page. Lerner can construct sentences other writers would give their eye-teeth to have written, but at the moment, they are just glorious sentence after glorious sentence. The opening scene, where Adam sees a man weeping in front of a painting in the museum, and is more moved by the guards’ inability to know what to do than either the art or the man having some kind of experience over the art, is a sublime short story. It reminded me of Nam Le’s answer to a question at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: “I know a short story’s finished when it threatens to turn into a novel”.

In older, kinder days, both these novels would herald a brave, if somewhat faltering, new talent. I hope the electronic point of sale figures allow us to hear them again.