From a James Wood review.

James Wood writing about the protagonist of Adam Gordon's Leaving the Atocha Station:

Adam--at once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome--is a charming representative of twenty-first-century American Homo literatus. He is a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone that poetry isn't about anything), and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and certainty.

If the book is sufficiently savvy about this guy, it's probably worth reading. I sometimes think that if not for the Holy Spirit, I'd turn into a character like this.

(Though maybe Christianity just keeps me from being either too charming or too loathsome?)