I wrote about Ben Lerner's new novel for the Wallstreet Journal

Ben Lerner, at age 40, has nothing to be embarrassed about: He is a MacArthur Fellow, one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, and one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world. Yet to read his first two novels is to squirm with vicarious embarrassment—not only because his characters are embarrassed by frank displays of sincerity, but also because his characters’ very embarrassment is itself embarrassing. In “Leaving the Atocha Station,” Mr. Lerner’s masterly 2011 debut, his narrator and alter-ego Adam Gordon watches a man weeping in the Prado. “Was he,” Adam wonders, “just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?” Adam, a would-be poet who cannot bring himself to write any poems, is skeptical that profound experiences of art really exist—though he is desperate to believe that they do, which is why he has written such an ambivalent novel about them. Like Adam, we are embarrassed for the man who cries but also horrified by the man who can’t. Read more here.