If you read this book having known what it was about and then didn't like it you would only have yourself to blame.
The flawed first person narrator is an American poet on a fellowship in Spain, knowingly feeling fraudulent, and somewhat of the school of John Ashbery, the difficult icon of contemporary American poetry. He tells lies, lives on a diet of pills, dope, booze and coffee and mooches about with two unconvincing relationships with women in progress.
He inevitably bares comparison with Mersault in Camus' L'Etranger while stopping short of shooting anyone for no reason.
I thought I'd risk it because two reviews I saw made this sound like an essential debut novel, something of a masterpiece, and I'm glad I did because I'm sure they were right. But it could have been a close decision. I can see why others would have a litany of reservations about it.
It is brilliantly realized and entirely convincing, Adam Gordon's blurred grasp of his own life is captured best in the several takes he has on each exchange in Spanish conversation - the dizzying effect of multiple possible meanings when he recognizes the words but not quite the significance of how they have been put together. It is also funny in a coolly laconic way, his detachment always adding to the feeling that he doesn't think he cares. He is apparently a brilliant poet but doubts if that is 'authentic'. For him, everything is bad faith and his poetry the most significant expression of it.
We don't have much sympathy for him, I think, and he doesn't endear himself but that worries me a lot because he seems to me to be right most of the time, for example in his reaction to Ashbery, whose
flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page it was impossible to say what sense has been made.
He has confessed very early in the narrative that,
I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew.
Because I, when I was quite young, was the one who read Camus' La Chute and came away thinking that the narrator was a really good bloke.
Adam's apperance on a discussion panel towards the end reveals something of the fraud that he knows he is and it's a fear I've had attending academic conferences that my painfully thin knowledge or appreciation in many areas might be revealed and my very attendance at the event reduced to absurdity.
So in a book in which the main character admits that,
if I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted an acknowledgement of my own preposterousness,
and is later asked,
'When are you going to stop pretending that you are pretending to be a poet?'
I feel quite at home but still unsure whether that is a good thing, a bad thing or if not knowing is the whole point.
So, although this is very much the sort of book that would annoy many sensible, right-thinking people for the self-absorption of its anti-hero, it takes those risks and is a brilliant discussion of this angst and torment. I'm going to take the chance on saying that it is a masterpiece but if you've taken the hint from the generous selection of quotes above you will already have a shrewd idea if it's very much a book that you should avoid.