A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying the Artist

In 2014, in London for a bookfair, I found myself at dinner with an English editor who expressed his admiration of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I had read it not long before for an essay I’d been drawn into writing on W. G. Sebald’s influence on the contemporary novel, and the thundering praise heaped upon it puzzled me. When I inquired as to what the editor had liked about it, he mused, “I just thought it was very funny, you know. How pretentious the main character is, but how he’s always undermining his own pretension.” I asked the man for his favorite joke. He said he couldn’t remember.