The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2011.

Leaving the Atocha Station has five chapters. Each chapter details the progression of the “research” (1) of Adam Gordon. Adam is a poet from Topeka, Kansas, living in Providence, Rhode Island. He is on a residency fellowship in Madrid, sponsored by a Spanish foundation for the arts. The nature of Adam’s project is highly ambiguous. In narration, Adam gives the impression that he is using the term “research” (1) somewhat ironically. He keeps this defensive ironic remove from his work for much of the novel, which progresses roughly chronologically. Adam is well aware of the absurdity of his being in Spain on what amounts to an all-expenses paid, if no-frills, vacation. Very little is required of him there. He ignores invitations to participate in events held by the foundation for its fellows. He is provided a Spanish-language tutor to help with proficiency. Initially, Adam’s tutor Jorge is his only connection to Spanish sociality. Adam hangs out with Jorge’s friends from the language school where he works. Through Jorge, Adam meets Isabel, who also works at the language school. After an initial miscommunication, Adam and Isabel begin a romantic relationship. This relationship is highly unequal, as Adam’s class position as an American expatriate is a more privileged one than Isabel’s. This comes to the fore at various points in the novel, notably when Isabel brings Adam to visit her aunt Rufina.

During an ill-fated trip to Granada, Isabel tells him Adam that she intends to get back together with her more serious boyfriend, Oscar. Adam is devastated. He falls into a strange depression upon returning to Madrid. Eventually Isabel visits him and Adam, in faux-graciousness, offers to take her a dinner as a way of terminating their relationship amicably. He ends up cruelly humiliating Isabel and flying into a panic attack. But the two part with a final intimacy that is cut off by an unexpected turn of historical events.

All the while that Adam was with Isabel he had been harboring more serious feelings for Teresa, an affluent, chic artist who has met through Arturo, her brother. Arturo befriended the loner Adam at a bar one evening in Chueca. Upon learning that Adam is a poet on a residency in Madrid, Arturo invites Adam to give a reading at his art gallery. Adam does not invite Isabel to this and later mentions it to her in order to make her feel bad about herself. Moreover, Adam also keeps Teresa and Isabel separate, never socializing with either together, but referring to the other in turn in order to evoke jealousy in whomever he is with at the moment. Unlike with Isabel, Adam’s relationship with Teresa is largely unconsummated. The upper-class Teresa, brother of Arturo, remains inaccessible to Adam in numerous. But she inspires within him a repressed desire to make a life for himself in Spain. Teresa takes on the task of translating Adam’s poetry from English into Spanish. She throws herself into this work and seems to respect Adam as a poet. Nonetheless, Adam suspects that her investment in his poetry represents a fleeting self-deception on Teresa’s part, one that he fears she will inevitably outgrow.

The story takes a dramatic turn in the fourth chapter, which begins on March 11th of 2004, the day that Madrid is convulsed by a deadly terrorist attack on its metro system. This attack kills hundreds. Within the context of the novel, it is reminder of the intrusion of the historical and the political into the deceptively insulated world of interpersonal relations. The bombs used in the attack detonated near Atocha Station. Among the fatalities are overrepresentation of working-class commuters and immigrants. This serves as a reminder to the reader of Adam’s insulation from work and his over-indulged status as an American on a lenient visa in Europe. Indeed, Adam’s awareness of himself as an American expatriate in Spain takes on a different resonance after the attacks, which initially seem to draw him closer to Arturo, Arturo’s boyfriend Rafa, and to Teresa. But Adam’s position as an outsider to Spanish politics marks him as superfluous in Madrid. His position as a poet – especially one outside his native social context – in such a time of political upheaval, he intuits, is a decadent one.

The absurdity of Adam’s position is underscored by the invitation he receives to participate in a panel discussion on the place of contemporary Spanish literature at the foundation. Adam paranoically believes this is an attempt to humiliate him by the foundation emissary, María José, who had previously attended his poetry reading at Arturo’s gallery despite Adam not inviting her. María José, he assumes, is convinced that he is a fraud and is determined to expose his charlatanism, which is an affront to the foundation. Adam, by default submits to participate on the panel. To his surprise, Teresa has been invited onto the illustrious panel as well. This marks her for him as an intellectual and cultural figure of note in her own right – something that he had not previously considered. Adam’s presence is initially passable on the panel, but he makes a glaring error that reveals his shameful dilettantism.

At the very end of the novel Adam seems to have weathered the psychic storm of the panel and suppressed a number of personal demons as to his own fragile ego and his battle with mental illness and pharmacological dependencies. This culminates in a reading of his translated work, side by side with Teresa, at Arturo’s gallery in the Salamanca neighborhood of Madrid. Up to that point, Adam had been intensely considering whether he should remain in Spain after the formal period of his fellowship has elapsed. He compares his prospects in Spain and the possibility of living in his second, non-native language, with a staid bourgeois life in the US. The question of whether to stay on in Spain or not seems to hinge for him on the genuineness of Teresa’s affection for him. This affection represents not simply his desirability to her, but more broadly his legitimacy as a poet.