I’m guessing that the answer to the above question is No. OK, he’s probably played poker from time to time but he doesn’t think so much about it. I make this guess based on the complete absence of any poker references in Lerner’s three novels, as well as the lack of relevant hits when googling *”Ben Lerner” poker*.

In contrast, I think about poker a lot. It’s been several decades since I was in a regular Thursday night poker game, and, even then, none of us were serious about it. But poker isn’t just a game, or a business; it’s also a way of thinking, a perspective perhaps best captured in Mike Caro’s classic Book of Tells.

It goes like this. You have your cards and your plans, you’re looking at the other players, and they’re looking at you. You decide what you’re going to do, and you decide how to present yourself. If you have a pair of aces in the hole, you probable don’t want to present yourself that way! So you decide how you want other people to see you and then you method-act yourself into that role. Maybe you’ll present yourself as having a pair of nines: this would justify you reluctantly staying in the hand and motivate some sap with a pair of queens to try to take advantage of you. Or maybe there’s a jack on the board and you’ll present yourself as having a jack in the hole. In order to be convincing, you visualize the whole thing: Jack-nine, perhaps. Or you play the role of having nothing, you’re staying in just from hope or as a pure bluff. In which case you’ll try to act like someone with trash who’s pretending to have a high pair. This is all kind of ridiculous given that all the other players are trying to figure you out and they all think the same way, but it’s hard to avoid. After all, what’s the alternative? Act like you do have a pair of aces?

I thought of all this because Leaving the Atocha Station had many passages where the viewpoint character is presenting in that way. For example, from page 86:

I was surprised to find myself taking Teresa’s hand, although I did so with the faintest trace of irony, implied, at least potentially, in the childish way I slightly swung our arms; if the intimacy were unwelcome, she would dismiss it as frivolity. At the same time I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace, that if I was acting unburdened and optimistic it was to cover the great sadness arising from the situation with my family. . . .

This is just so poker, the mix of strategy, inference, deception, and self-deception. “I was careful to communicate, mainly with my pace,” indeed! It’s about as plausible as thinking that I can present myself as holding a pair of nines.

The paradox, of course, is that Lerner in this passage, and in his novel more generally, is successfully conveying this character and his state of mind. But it’s a lot easier to do this in the privacy of your office, arranging and rearranging the sentences and paragraphs until it all works out, than to do it in a real-time social interaction. And Lerner happens to be really really good at writing; he’s the literary equivalent of a Vegas pro, not a weekly nickel-ante aficionado. Also, having read his three novels, I think it’s fair to say that there’s only one character he can really impersonate in this way. His other characters are convincing enough—in The Topeka School he successfully handles a few different voices—but he doesn’t really get inside them the way he does this “Adam” or “Ben” character.

That’s fine! One deep dive into a character is more than most writers can do. I enjoyed all three of Lerner’s novels. First I read 10:04, then The Topeka School, then Leaving the Atocha Station. They were kinda the same novel over and over again, but that’s ok too. Philip K. Dick wrote a zillion similar novels and they were all worth reading. Reading Scanner and then Valis and then Ubik is good: their similarities make us see through to more of the depth, as well as allowing us to appreciate all the little details that much more. To put it another way: writing three 200-books about different episodes in the life of the same character is no worse than writing a single 600-page tome.

Anyway, Atocha had three gimmicks that I enjoyed:

1. The character’s amusing behavior where he haplessly tries to convey a state of mind using ambiguous and uninterpretable actions (as in the above excerpt): that’s the poker thing.

2. Quiplike honest, for example from page 50:

“The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,” I said, meaninglessly. . . .

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.”

I love how the character can stand outside himself in this way. That “meaninglessly” is perfect.

3. Conveying the difficulty of communication in a foreign language, for example on page 14:

I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, and analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car . . .

That “and/or” is perfectly, inappropriately precise.

And, ultimately, all languages are foreign languages, are they not? (I said, meaninglessly.)

Lerner’s other books don’t feature these particular tricks, but they have other fun bits. For example, from 10:04, page 182:

We arrived at the same time as the intern, who must not have known if he had the authority to invite us, and when we confronted each other in the gravel driveway, he smiled with embarrassment. Before he could try to account for himself, I hugged him as if he were an old friend I was thrilled to see after an interval of years—a kind of humor totally out of character for me—and everyone laughed and was at ease. How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

“How many out-of-character things,” indeed. An excellent bit of metafiction.

Speaking of the Lernerverse: at the end of The Topeka School there is a page of Acknowledgments. This is the sort of thing that I’ll read when I really enjoyed a book; the cake is done and now I will eat all available crumbs. Anyway, one person Lerner thanks here “for encouragement and criticism” is Ed Skoog.

Ed Skoog! I remember that name. I look him up . . . he’s a poet, he’s from Topeka, Kansas, just like Ben Lerner! But that’s not where I remember the name. I remember the name Ed Skoog from seeing his name on Rhian Ellis and John Lennon’s blog, back in the day. Regular readers of our blog will remember Lennon from his New Sentences For The Testing Of Typewriters (“What joker put seven dog lice in my Iraqi fez box?”, “‘Yo, never mix Zoloft with Quik,’ gabs Doc Jasper,” etc.). Funny to see these connections, almost as if writers are real people, not just creators of artifacts. (Fyi, Lennon continues to write great stuff, even if he’s no longer on the literary fast-track; I guess this is related to the famous disappearance of the “mid-list” in the publishing business.)

Still wanting more, I googled Lerner’s book titles to see some reviews and also, I’m embarrassed to say, to learn more about his life. I didn’t learn whether he’s still in contact with “Cyrus,” “Isabel,” “Teresa,” or any of the other characters from Atocha (assuming they are “based” on “real people”), and to be honest I didn’t get much out of the reviews. I often enjoy reading reviews of books I’ve already read—indeed, I think book reviews are underrated (see here for the general point and here for an example)—but this time the reviews mostly just echoed my thoughts. That’s ok, it’s not the job of critics to cater to me.

One thing that did make me happy is that almost 100% of the reviews of Lerner’s books were enthusiastically positive. I’d kind of been afraid that there’d be some resentment of his success. Critics are a bunch of scorpions, right? No, I guess not: when they read a fun and thought-provoking book, they seem to like it. I found lots and lots of positive reviews of those three novels and nary a pan. All I could find that was even partly negative was one article that criticized Lerner and some other authors for being too sanctimoniously leftist, and another article that made fun of him for apparently not having a solid knowledge of German, thus leading Lerner to write an annoying introduction to a translated book by a German author. If those are the worst two things I can find about such a celebrated author, I’d have to say that the tall-poppy syndrome of book reviewing is less negative than I’d feared. No joke, I’m happy that the critics can focus on his work and not feel the need to pull him down. Maybe it will take a movie adaptation for the haters to really come out of the woodwork.