Nowhere Man - Invisible by Paul Auster
- David Free
Invisible by Paul Auster
Faber, 304 pages, $Au 32.99.
Paul Auster is nothing if not readable. I mean this as a compliment, but it could also serve as a rather unkind gesture towards his limitations. Beyond his knack for spinning superficially compelling plots, Auster doesn’t have many conspicuous strengths as a novelist. His prose can sound a bit robotic, and it’s far from cliché-proof. His characters are types. His dialogue can be radically unconvincing. You could take the view that Auster keeps these things flat deliberately, because he wants his novels to have the texture of fables. Or maybe his novels read like fables because he has no style. I don’t think we can rule this explanation out.
But let’s stay with Auster’s virtues for a moment. He’s in touch with the excitements of old-fashioned story-telling. He employs multiple narrators, Chinese-box structures. He gives you enigmatic strangers, femmes fatales, books within books, other books within those ones. He’s also good at beginnings. Think of the opening pages of his first novel, City of Glass. The narrator, a mystery writer by the name of Quinn, gets a phone call in the dead of night. The voice on the other end asks, hoarsely and desperately, to speak with a person Quinn has never heard of: a Mr Paul Auster, of the Auster Detective Agency. So Quinn pretends to be Auster, and takes the case. How’s that for a startling premise?
Auster’s new novel, Invisible, starts out pretty promisingly too. The first seventy pages are set in 1967, and are narrated by a student and aspiring poet named Adam Walker. At a party Walker meets an academic named Rudolf Born: formidable, Swiss, enigmatic in the extreme. When Born goes for a brief sojourn in Paris, Walker has a brief sojourn in Born’s girlfriend, the dark and exotic Margot. (“We didn’t fall for each other, as the saying goes, but rather we fell into each other …” As the other saying goes.) Born returns to America, finds out about the affair, and dumps Margot. And then, on a New York street, Born and Walker are accosted by an armed mugger. Born pulls a knife and stabs the mugger to death, then dumps the body in the park. By the time Walker summons the moral courage to report him to the police, Born has decamped to Paris for good. End of Part One.
It’s a tantalising set-up. Three-quarters of the novel remain; one prepares oneself for the thickenings and complications of the following Acts. Well, one was a bit of an idiot to start doing that. This is Paul Auster, after all. And what he now does is this: just when he’s got the narrative sails nicely full of wind, he perversely changes tack. He presents us, at the beginning of Part Two, with a new narrator: a novelist named Jim Freeman. Back in 1967, Freeman had been a college friend of Walker’s. Now, in 2008, Walker is dying of cancer. He’s just sent Freeman the first part of his autobiography, which ends with Born’s killing of the mugger; now he needs Freeman’s help to write the rest. This never ends up happening; but its failure to occur takes place over a lot of pages, and via many further switches of narrator. Walker returns to narrate things in the second person for a while, and then in the third, both times through the filter of Walker’s first-person narration. Then Walker dies, and a third narrator steps in to finish the novel off. The Rudolf Born story continues to run through most of these narratives, but in an ever-diminishing form. Eventually it trickles to a halt, delivering nothing like the pay-off that the opening section had seemed to promise.
Does Auster’s constant tampering with his narrative frame achieve anything? Well, it keeps you reading; it keeps you guessing. I sped through this novel in about a day. (If I were an Auster character, I’d probably say I devoured it.) So let’s give him credit for that. He writes eminently readable books, and that’s not a negligible talent.
But is it enough? Invisible is an aptly named novel. You find yourself wondering, as you close it, where the book’s last two hundred pages got to. Not a great deal happens in them, apart from Auster’s constant, compulsive readjustments of the narrative frame. You wind up feeling undernourished, even a bit cheated. You feel that Auster has let himself off the hook as a novelist. By constantly returning his attention to the technical periphery, he gets out of having to plunge into the human centre of his story. And you doubt he could do that even if he wanted to. Auster’s much-vaunted preoccupation with surfaces strikes me as a convenient preoccupation for a not very substantial writer to have. The post-modern aesthetic gives him a licence to write superficial novels that will be deemed important. The premise of Invisible is a little reminiscent of the premise of The Bonfire of the Vanities; and once the comparison is made, it’s hard not to be amazed by how much less Auster does with his material, on almost every level, than Tom Wolfe did. Call me unfashionable, but I submit that Tom Wolfe, as irritating as his mannerisms can be, is a far bolder artist than Auster, as well as a harder-working one. Say what you like about Wolfe, he’s at least willing to go down the mine. You can see why he needs seven or eight years to write his books. Auster, on the other hand, spends about a year on each novel, and it shows. Wolfe, in Bonfire, made the most of his premise. He inhabited it fully; he imagined its consequences. By contrast, Auster’s narrative games seem a bit of a cop-out.
Nor are Auster’s surface shenanigans dazzling enough to constitute a meal in their own right, like the resonant games of a Calvino or a Borges. Indeed the texture of Auster’s fictions is really quite conventional, for all his reputation as an avant-gardist. His prose can be almost laughably plodding. “The London years. The somber revelations of dashed hopes, loveless sex in the beds of prostitutes, one serious liaison with an English girl named Dorothy that crashed to a sudden halt …” And so on. Auster’s three narrators, incidentally, all write in exactly the same way: they write like Paul Auster. Which is to say that they write, sometimes, as if they’re unfamiliar with the widely held view that clichés are a bad thing. Nor does Auster make any effort, while writing dialogue, to make his characters sound different from one another. Small linguistic matters don’t seem to trouble him. He has a dull ear. “If I find it unbearable,” writes one of his narrators, “I don’t suppose three days will be too much to bear.”
Beyond a certain point, it’s useless to castigate a writer for failing to achieve things that he doesn’t even attempt. Auster will never be a novelist in the classic sense. He finds the frame more interesting than what’s inside it, and probably always will. If his novels continue to come my way I’ll continue to read them, and I daresay I’ll continue to find them moderately entertaining. But unless he sells his soul to the devil in exchange for some literary flair, I suspect I’ll go on finding his work evasive rather than elusive, and inconsequential rather than teasingly diaphanous. Those who want to enrol him among our literary heavyweights don’t know what a heavyweight is, and any critic who calls him a stylist should be summarily fired.
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David Free is a writer based on the far north coast of New South Wales. His strangely neglected novel, A Dancing Bear, can be read here.