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Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy

I love Auster’s interviews; I’ve listened to his 92nd Street Y one half a dozen times, and my intro to his work was spending a week listening to A Man in the Dark, so pleased with the anecdotes from abroad, the quiet discussions of film, the twist of fiction, and solitude. He has a way with his voice; a way with forming his thoughts; a way with threading old and new, familiar and vague, foreign and home without hesitation. But that’s Auster in interviews and in audiobooks, physically present and human. I’ve found that reading his actual work is a little different, and though I’ve only read The New York Trilogy, I want to stop my journey short.

At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist.

[…]

What is problematic about these books is not their postmodern skepticism about the stability of the narrative, which is standard-issue fare, but the gravity and the emotional logic that Auster tries to extract from the “realist” side of his stories. Auster is always at his most solemn at those moments in his books which are least plausible and most ragingly unaffecting.

[…]

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.

James Wood, The New Yorker

That’s a pretty harsh evaluation, but that IS the “meat” and atmosphere of every one of Auster’s books. Auster’s postmodernism goes too far in which the act of author imbuing himself onto his protagonist becomes literal. Going past the “you and me” of postmoderism where author prods discreetly at himself and the reader, Auster concentrates on himself, characterizing himself as both author and reader, a fellow person. Paul Auster writes about himself and breaches the fourth wall by writing to himself. Worst of all, it’s rampant. Maybe I feel so strongly about this because of The New York Trilogy, the most flagrant offenders. Maybe better things lie in his better works.

But still—most importantly—I think he gets writing, and if only for that, I will think of him fondly.