Lost Generations.

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.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]