I stayed away from Ben Lerner for a long time because of all the connotations of the "autofiction" label. But I was really surprised. I think this is a really funny, pleasurable book; I think it does interesting, "new" things with narrative; and I think what it's doing doesn't really have much to do with whatever "autofiction" is supposed to mean.
On a plot level, the book covers a young American poet called Adam Gordon staying on a fellowship in Madrid around 2004. Gordon is a Ben Lerner alter-ego (Lerner also did a similar fellowship around this time), but what makes the autofiction label seem like a bad fit is that Adam is a really amusing chauvinistic shithead whose minor frauds and confusions constantly embroil him in little adventures of miscommunication and ego-inflation/deflation. So he seems to much more resemble any number of amusingly irritating fictional protagonists in the line of David Foster Wallace or Woody Allen much more than being a mask for Lerner. And his stupid decisions mean that there actually drama and narrative movement, even if it's not "plot" per se.
