A modern version of the Bildungsroman exemplified by Catcher in the Rye updated to include drugs, travel, worldly women, and poetry.  Adam is in Madrid on a fellowship which he is supposed to be using to explore how the Spanish Civil War affected poets but is instead, mostly sleeping, drinking, smoking dope, and pursuing several women.  His introspective bouts in which he has some self-awareness that he will eventually return to his two psychologist parents, marry, have children, buy a home, etc, are brief interludes in his otherwise wastrel life in Spain.  I must be getting too old to appreciate this kind of book, though the blurbists from James Wood (‘subtle, sinuous and very funny first novel which captures the unmomentous passage of undramatic life”), Jonathan Franzen (‘hilarious and cracklingly intelligent”), and John Ashbery (‘an extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life”).  Maybe I need to go back and read it again!