What "Leaving the Atocha Station" Says About America When an adviser to President Obama was quoted in The New Yorker as saying that the administration's policy in Libya was "leading from behind," he initiated a season of hand-wringing about American decline, as if he had announced that the president was implementing a secret plan to make a second-rate country even worse. But whether America is leading from - or falling - behind affects more than our foreign policy. It also affects how it feels to be an American, which is a central concern of American novelists. LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION (Coffee House Press, paper, $15), Ben Lerner's remarkable first novel, published last year, is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it's like to be a young American abroad. The plotting is scant. Adam Gordon, a poet, having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Madrid, makes friends, struggles with Spanish, smokes hash, wanders around, writes poetry, doubts poetry and has two low-energy love affairs. But the real action of the novel is interior. Gordon has two struggles: the classic one, to live authentically, and an aesthetic one, to represent "the texture of et cetera itself," with a poetry that transcends mere snapshots of localized events and attempts to capture the hum and buzz of "life's white machine." To Gordon, these struggles are the same: "I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time." In a book soaked in references to art and literature, there is no evident allusion to another short first novel centered on a young Midwesterner in Spain: "The Sun Also Rises," published in 1926. Lerner's novel could have the same epigraph as Ernest Hemingway's - Gertrude Stein: "You are all a lost generation" - and both books remind us that if you are far from home, alienated from life's clean meaning, unfulfilled in love, and have a lot of time on your hands, you can at least make the days pass by being stoned, drunk or both. Yet even if Hemingway's hero is from Kansas City, Mo., and Adam Gordon is from Topeka, Kan., about 60 miles away, a gulf separates their experiences and points of view. For Hemingway's characters, the traumatic event beneath their alienation is World War I. For Lerner's narrator, the traumatic event is the lack of a traumatic event: "While Spain was voting, I was checking e-mail." To Gordon, his fellow Americans" "soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours." In "The Sun Also Rises," American competence and power go unquestioned. Jake Barnes, its hero, knows Spanish and Spain and how things work. He pays his bills. He has passed the "oral spiritual examination" of bullfighting's true aficionados. The Americans in the novel aren't exemplary: Barnes is impotent, from a war wound; Robert Cohn is creepy in his unrequited love for Brett, Lady Ashley. Nonetheless, they are the strong ones - Cohn punches well and often - and the Europeans who aren't peasants (and thus simple and good) are mocked or pitied for their corruption, decadence and weakness. The condescension is reversed in "Leaving the Atocha Station." This partly follows the development of Spain, a country now known less for bullfights than for deconstructed foam appetizers. It is also, granted, a country that seems at risk of going bankrupt, as Mike Campbell did in "The Sun Also Rises," "two ways . . . gradually and then suddenly." But the rebalancing of pity is also a comment on America. Through much of Lerner's novel, Adam Gordon is comically incompetent, getting lost in Spain's history, language and occasionally its streets. Yet Spaniards react to Gordon's foolishness with amused mercy, viewing him as a sweet child or "a drunken American idiot brought to the party as a joke." Even Gordon's worst lie, that his mother is dead, is later brushed off by Teresa, one of his semi-lovers, as a statement that was never worth believing. America is not a generic country without context in the novel; Gordon's other semi-lover dryly tells him, "I'm sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy." But we are in a world far different from Hemingway's, where a Basque peasant brags of all the American cities he has visited. We are far from Whit Stillman's mordant 1994 film "Barcelona," in which two Americans must absorb lots of anti-American barbs and one anti-American bullet. In "Leaving the Atocha Station," we inhabit a world where Americans" Americanness is an interesting but inessential fact. Gary Sernovitz, the author of "Great American Plain" and "The Contrarians," recently completed his latest novel, "Like People Who Dream."