Spacial Oddities: Paul Auster's "Travels In the Scriptorium"

As my previous posts have shown, I've long been an ardent admirer of Paul Auster. However, with my recently completed reading of Travels In the Scriptorium, I realize I've only read two of his novels so far. His biographies, essays, and creative philosophies have profoundly affected me for years, and I even treasure his collected poems. No matter what comes next, from his future works to my eventual completion of his entire bibliography, I'll always count him among my favorite writers, solely based on his nonfictional works. The first Auster novel I read was Moon Palace, and my review was written not long after James Wood wrote a long, fairly scathing dissection of the major themes in the Auster canon. I was a bit younger at the time, and I probably defended Moon Palace more than I would have today. With Travels In the Scriptorium, it feels like Auster was reaching for everything and ended up with a handful of scattered notions. In a slightly twisted way, I'm glad for the opportunity to constructively critique his work, without sacrificing my overall appreciation of his style. For such a slim, quick read, this 2006 work tries to incorporate a wildly diverse set of literary themes, ideas so broadly highlighted and practically annotated. It's not that Auster's prose is lacking, but the plot tries much too hard to be both experimental and straightforward.

It's a story told within the confines of a single day. An old man dubbed Mr. Blank awakens in a small room with very hazy memories of who he is and how he got there. In addition to the bed, there's a desk, a series of papers, and a stack of photographs. Everything in the room, from the lamp to the walls, is labeled accordingly. Mr. Blank is confused, yet finds the occasional remembrance of his past and potential hints as to why he's in this small space. It could be a hospital, or a prison, or a rest home. He is also careful and thoughtful about his own body, especially in relation to his living space.

"Mr. Blank lowers his body into the chair at the desk. It is an exceedingly comfortable chair, he decides, made of soft brown leather and equipped with broad armrests to accommodate his elbows and forearms, not to speak of an invisible spring mechanism that allows him to rock back and forth at will, which is precisely what he begins to do the moment he sits down. Rocking back and forth has a soothing effect on him, and as Mr. Blank continues to indulge in these pleasurable oscillations, he remembers the rocking horse that sat in his bedroom when he was a small boy, and then he begins to to relive some of the imaginary journeys he used to take on that horse, whose name was Whitey and who, in the young Mr. Blank's mind, was not a wooden object adorned with white paint but a living being, a true horse.

After this brief excursion into his early boyhood, anguish rises up into Mr. Blank's throat again. He says out loud in a weary voice: I mustn't allow this to happen (Auster 4)."

From the beginning to the end, Mr. Blank is a willing and unwilling host to a series of phone calls and visitors, some with seemingly noble intentions, and some who very well be out to kill him. He attempts to piece together information, from the statements of his visitors, the photographs, and the complex manuscript in his office (evidence is given for the manuscript being a novel or an oral history). As each visitor comes and goes, Blank adds a name to a list, whether it's the name of the visitor or a name dropped in the conversation, with the hopes of fitting together the puzzle. Blank is also visited by two women, both nurses, one of whom very well could be a lost love. However, it's slightly embarrassing that the sole women in the novel are nothing more than sexual manifestations for Blank, even if Anna, the first woman, is presented in slightly more noble lights.

"Anna smiles, then bends over once more and kisses Mr. Blank squarely on the lips. In that it lasts for a good three seconds, the kiss qualifies as more than just a peck, and even though no tongues are involved, this intimate contact sends a tingle of arousal coursing through Mr. Blank's body. By the time Anna straightens up, he has already begun to swallow the pills (Auster 17)."

The pills are referenced a few times as part of a mysterious treatment. Are the pills designed to help Blank remember or forget past events, namely atrocities? Is he a military leader of some sort? There are indications that people died or were lost carrying out his orders, although the nature of these are kept intentionally vague. The manuscript he's asked to read is written out within the novel and forms its own compelling story. It's a tale of competing tribes, military lies, deceit, and a young man carrying messages back and forth. It's fairly concise and doesn't confuse the reader, and the overall question is whether it's a true story or part of a larger plan to confuse Blank. Within the manuscript are sentences and observations that make Travels In the Scriptorium feel like a longer metaphor for literature itself.

"What's the matter, citizen? Are you afraid of the truth? His eyes were full of rage and contempt, and because we were so close to each other, those eyes were the only objects in my field of vision. I could feel the hostility flowing through his body, and an instant later I felt it pass directly into mine. That was when I went after him. Yes, he had touched me first, but the moment I started to fight back, I wanted to hurt him, to hurt him badly as I could (Auster 51)." (italics mine)

Travels In the Scriptorium works to a point if the reader quickly surmises that there's not going to be any grand revelation in the end. That's not the point of the novel. The plot and structure are merely boxes to deliver ideas about literature and its potentials. However, Auster makes the mistake of adding just one too many details, therefore ensuring an abrupt ending. If the story of Mr. Blank was told without the manuscript, it could have been fashioned to ask the same questions. If the story was about a man reading a mysterious manuscript and attempting to determine its legitimacy, without questions about his own life and the visitors, the same goal could have been accomplished. Again, Auster's prose is excellent, and his structure is a well-intentioned homage to the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, to name a few. But my biggest concern is that it doesn't shed any more light on the subjects. The questions are asked without a need to be answered, but they're the same questions that have been posed for decades. And as much as I admire Auster's worldview, I'm sure he's had his share of much too ebullient praise and much too harsh criticism (James Wood being the aforementioned example). There's a passage within the novel that jumped out at me and made me wonder if it was a sly stab at his own critics, or a humorous take on the nature of literature, since every single writer has his or her detractors. And maybe, just maybe, he's envisioning how readers will react to the story they're reading.

"Mr. Blank tosses the typescript onto the desk, snorting with dissatisfaction and contempt, furious that he has been compelled to read a story that has no ending, an unfinished work that has barely begun, a mere bloody fragment. What garbage, he says out loud, and then, swiveling the chair around by a hundred and eighty degrees, he wheels himself over to the bathroom door (Auster 84)."

And then, as if for good measure, this passage appears near the end. For dignity's sake, I like to read it from the point of view of a writer reading his or her own material. We've all been frustrated with output or a piece of fiction not coming together properly, and we've all envisioned this classic response:

"By now, Mr. Blank has read all he can stomach, and he is not the least bit amused. In an outburst of pent-up anger and frustration, he tosses the manuscript over his shoulder with a violent flick of the wrist, not even bothering to turn around to see where it lands. As it flutters through the air and then thuds to the floor behind him, he pounds his fist on the desk and says in a loud voice: When is this nonsense going to end (Auster 143)?"

Auster has a new memoir coming out this fall, and I believe it's supposed to be a sort of companion piece to last year's Winter Journal, which I adored. I'm thankful that Travels In the Scriptorium wasn't the first book of his that I read--if it had been, I'd likely be hard-pressed to continue. This may sound terribly harsh, but I say this as someone who considers Paul Auster a treasure, someone whose writings have had a direct influence on my own growth as a reader and a writer. I know what he's capable of doing, especially through his essays and prose. I'm going to carefully choose my next Auster novel, since the last two haven't held up to his non-fiction writings. But as I said before, even if I flat-out despise the next piece of Auster fiction that I read, it won't diminish his overall skill. I just hope that there's nowhere to go but up.

Work Cited:
Auster, Paul. Travels In the Scriptorium. Copyright 2006 by Paul Auster.

Weathering Storms: Paul Auster's "Winter Journal"

I admire more than a few authors who are equally talented in fiction and nonfiction writings, but generally, I tend to favor their fictional sides--as much as I promote and love the essay (and the essay collection), I'd be more apt to pick a novel as a favorite work, rather than a collection of critical pieces. However, this belief gets turned around when it comes to Paul Auster. I've long considered him one of my favorites, but upon reflection, it's shocking to realize how little of his fiction I've actually read (one novel, a handful of shorter works and samples). His memoir, craft explorations, and poetry move me a lot more, and The Invention of Solitude, his 1982 explorations of family, masculinity and writing is one of the very few books that changed me and how I view my own approach to creativity. It was recommended to me while I was dealing with long bouts of financial strain, isolation, and attempts to figure out my priorities while living outside Seattle, Washington. It wasn't a romantic time, and who I am today is directly related to who I was back then (that was around the time I started putting my shaky writing into this blog format). Recently, Auster published Winter Journal, and remembering how much his previous work affected me, I was eager to read this one. It's vastly different in its approach and content, but I still found myself touched and moved in unexpected ways.

It isn't an autobiography or a memoir in the traditional sense. Instead, Auster explores various moments in his life, from physical descriptions to analyses of random happenings to descriptions of the dozens of homes and areas where he's lived, but without any cliched nostalgia. There are fond memories, painful, brutally honest critiques of himself, and reflections on his body. At first, it appears to be chronological, but quickly, Auster begins to alternate time frames. Early memories of two childhood accidents are quickly followed with adult observations. Auster writes in the second person point of view, addressing himself as "you," which allows for two sides of the narrative--in addition to sharing aspects of his life as a sort of letter to his self in various ages, it allows the reader to inhabit Auster's world, especially when (and this happens quite often, at least for me) he gets into universal experiences.

"Yes, you drink too much and smoke too much, you have lost teeth without bothering to replace them, your diet does not conform to the precepts of contemporary nutritional wisdom, but if you shun most vegetables it is simply because you do not like them, and you find it difficult, if not impossible, to eat what you do not like. You know that your wife worries about you, especially about your smoking and drinking, but mercifully, until now, no X-ray has revealed any damage to your lungs, no blood test has revealed any devastation to your liver, and so you forge on with your vile habits, knowing full well that they will ultimately do you grave harm, but the older you become the less likely it seems that you will ever have the will or the courage to abandon your beloved little cigars and the frequent glasses of wine, which have given you so much pleasure over the years, and you sometimes think that if you were to cut these things out of your life at this late date, your body would simply fall apart, your system would cease to function (Auster 14-15)."

This is a universal picture, but at times, he even goes even further. If some of the passages strike readers as self-serving, even when mixed with ruminations on his shortcomings, he sits back and offers the occasional philosophical sentiment that might not be original, still gives the reader cause for thought, even if these thoughts have been experienced by everyone at some point in their lives. And while the thoughts aren't "original," the writing certainly is--note the descriptions and careful word choices in this passage:

"You would like to know who you are. With little or nothing to guide you, you take it for granted that you are the product of vast, prehistoric migrations, of conquests, rapes, and abductions, that the long and circuitous intersections of your ancestral horde have extended over many territories and kingdoms, for you are not the only person who has traveled, after all, tribes of human beings have been moving around the earth for tens of thousands of years, and who knows who begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom to end up with your two parents begetting you in 1947 (Auster 115)?"

And while this isn't strictly autobiography, there are enough details to gain a better idea of Auster's life. I know very little about his life, save for the murder of his grandfather by his grandmother (mentioned here and further documented in The Invention Of Solitude). He's been married twice, once to the writer Lydia Davis, who is mentioned not by name, but by the occasional sketch and rumination about living with another writer (as my friend Jeremy once said, "to be a fly on the wall for that relationship"). There are sad, touching remembrances included in his meticulous documentation of the places he's called home.

"Age 32. Before landing there in early 1979, a whirlwind of shocks, sudden changes, and inner upheavals that turned you around and set your life on a different course. With nowhere to go and no money to finance a move even if you had known where to go, you stayed on in the Dutchess County after the breakup of your marriage, sleeping on the sofa bed in the corner of your downstairs study, which you now realize (thirty-two years later) had been your bed as a child. A couple of weeks later, on a trip down to New York, you experienced the revelation, the scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity that pushed you through a crack in the universe and allowed you to start writing again. Three weeks after that, immersed in the prose text you had begun immediately after your resuscitation, your liberation, your new beginning, the unexpected hammer blow of your father's death. To your first wife's infinite credit, she stuck with you through the dismal days and weeks that followed, the ordeal of funeral arrangements and estate matters, disposing of your father's neckties, suits, and furniture, taking care of the sale of his house (which had already been in the works), standing by you through all the wrenching, practical business that follows death, and because you were no longer married, or married in name only, the pressures of marriage had been lifted, and once again you were friends, much as you had been in your early days together (Auster 91-92)."

The passages are combinations of smaller vignettes and much longer passages, some of which, while very well written, didn't hold much interest for me. Even with strong prose, I found myself glossing over some of Auster's sexual details. To his credit, while tinted with a hint of longing, he doesn't veer into embarrassing reminiscences of lost prowess or such. His sex life is merely a part of his life as whole, with the passages given equal time as the rest of his memories. Some of the happenings weigh on his mind more than others--two separate sections are devoted to details of a nasty car accident that nearly killed him and his family. The painful realization of mortality is a given, which makes the surrounding sketches that much more poignant.

"The day after the car crash in 2002, you went to the junkyard where the car had been towed to retrieve your daughter's belongings. It was a Sunday morning in August, warm as always, with a misty blur of rain dappling the streets as one of your friends drove you out to some godforsaken neighborhood in Brooklyn, a no-man's-land of crumbling warehouses, vacant lots, and boarded-up wooden buildings. The junkyard was run by a black man in his mid-sixties, a smallish fellow with long dreadlocks and clear, steady eyes, a gentle Rasta man who watched over his domain of wrecked automobiles like a shepherd tending a flock of dozing sheep. You told him why you were there, and when he led you over to the shiny new Toyota you had been driving the day before, you were stunned by how thoroughly destroyed it was, could not fathom how you and your family had managed to survive such a catastrophe. Immediately after the crash, you had noticed how badly damaged the car was, but you had been rattled by the collision, were not fully able to absorb what had happened to you, but now, a day later, you could see that the metal body of the car was so smashed in, it looked like a piece of crumbled paper. 'Look at that,' you said to the Rasta man. 'We should all be dead now.' He studied the car for a few seconds, looked you in the eye, and then turned his head upward as the fine rain fell onto his face and abundant hair. 'An angel was watching over you,' he said in a quiet voice. 'You were supposed to die yesterday, but then an angel stretched out his hand and pulled you back into the world.' He delivered those words with such serenity and conviction, you almost believed him (Auster 167-168)."

There's no doubt that some of these descriptions might be slightly embellished, and if this is the case, it's not done to stretch the truth in a misleading way. I believe this because even the most "novel-like" passages are no different than the smaller, mundane aspects of Auster's life experiences. That's what made Winter Journal so satisfying to me. His prose never gives the reader the feeling that he's at the true end of his life, looking back wistfully, even though the book might seem that way at first glance. These are moments of his life, big and small, presented as they are. It makes the "Journal" part of the title very accurate. Yes, this is a published work, but part of me, even if this is slightly naive, can see the book being an unpublished project for Auster's own reflections.

Because the mentions of his previous works are either scarce or brought up in passing, I'd be hard pressed to imagine someone unfamiliar with Auster picking this book up, but I could see myself enjoying it on its own. In due time, I'm sure there will be an independent biography of Auster published, one that will expand on his travels, marriages, and writings. However, Winter Journal is beautiful and provides new information and highlights I had been unfamiliar with before. Outside of general curiosity, he's a writer who interests me more with his words than his exploits, and these pages put more emphasis on the former. I found this difficult to review and cite, since quite a few of the passages are long and so intricate that providing a sample would be pointless out of context. His style is unique, and while nothing in it affected me like The Invention Of Solitude, I had the rare experience of being moved emotionally as well as being moved by his craft. I've long had my own issues with the memoir genre as a whole, but Auster's formatting and attention to detail made this reading experience so much more than an inventory of what he's done and experienced.

Work Cited:
Auster, Paul. Winter Journal. Copyright 2012 by Paul Auster.

Inside Voices: The Poetry of Paul Auster

While researching previous essays on Paul Auster, I was reminded of the criticisms he receives. My review of Moon Palace highlights some of the major ones, namely his lack of dynamic female protagonists and his tendency to repeat common themes throughout his fiction. However, since I've read only one of his novels so far, the majority of these critiques are taken from secondary readings. Rare is the writer who lacks personal or creative faults, especially when various writings are open to vastly different opinions. Then again, I'm personally able to take the bad with the good with some of my favorites. I've written many pieces that stress my admiration for the style and philosophy of Jonathan Franzen, yet I've disagreed with more than a handful of his statements. Getting back to Auster, I was perplexed to re-read the words of literary critic James Wood, who likened Auster supporters to dutiful stamp collectors, and in a roundabout way expressed dismissal over Auster's prolific output. The man has written many books. Recently, I was browsing his collection at Chicago's Harold Washington Library, and I scanned titles that I hadn't recalled seeing before. The pros and cons of a vast bibliography seem like new arguments, but ones lobbed at only a select few writers. One could make the case that, for example's sake, Don DeLillo works in similar fashions, with seemingly annual works that occasionally blend themes and settings. Since I have a long way to go in reading the rest of Auster's works, I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of his Collected Poems. I'm an ardent fan of his nonfiction, and more readings of his novels will come in the future. By reading his poetry, I was able to introduce myself to his writings in a different format, and in the process discover new traits (as well as sketches of his older ones).

The selections in Collected Poems span the 1970s, and also include some of Auster's French translations from the late 1960s. Given the fact that these are the works of a young poet (as Norman Finkelstein writes in his introduction, Auster's later poetry was the precursor to his fiction), especially when written in a time of social upheaval, one wouldn't be faulted for assuming that the works would be biting. He does bring the occasional outline of (then) contemporary culture, but the majority of the poems are striking in their combination of thematic simplicity, expanded into complex poetic atmospheres. Subjects and metaphors that can easily be overwrought are presented in sometimes minimal context, hitting their marks and moving on before they have the chance to be redundant or weighed down. The human senses are prevalent, and one of the best examples is the third poem from the collection "Unearth:"

"The blind way is etched
in your palm: it leads to the voice
you had bartered, and will bleed, once again
on the prongs of this sleep-hewn
braille. A breath
scales the wick of my stammering,
and lights the air that will never
recant. Your body is your own
measured burden. And walks with the weight
of fire (Auster 39)."

In a strictly basic sense, I found myself continually reminded of Moon Palace, in that the poems jump back and forth between urban and rural atmospheres, even if the settings are only passing hints. The reader is transported to literally timeless scenes, and sometimes the balance between a poem and its title can hint to both the urban and rural conditions. The easy "answer" is that perception is the same, no matter where one comes from; it's what we perceive that changes, not the actual act. To make more sense of this, the poem "Northern Lights" helps. There is no hint of any outside influence beyond natural phenomenon, therefore making the poem a wonderful moment that could be experienced anywhere.

"These are the words
that do not survive the world. And to speak them
is to vanish

into the world. Unapproachable
light
that heaves above the earth, kindling
the brief miracle

of the open eye--

and the day that will spread
like a fire of leaves
through the first chill wind
of October

consuming the world

in the plain speech
of desire (Auster 125)."



Granted, fiction and poetry, and essays are their own forms. Even with his general lack of well-rounded female characters, Auster has a place as one of the strongest writers of masculinity and male creativity. With this in mind, his poetry is amazingly neutral, and goes back to my aforementioned hypothesis of creating emotions that fit into multiple categories. The strongest theme in his poems is communication, or lack thereof. Voices are stifled, intention is lost, and communication in all of its forms is highlighted in both complexity and the ability to be limited. The emotional looks at love and communication are left open to be potentially uttered by male or female speakers. Given his background and knowledge of the French language, some of the stronger imagery could be broken down as masculine or feminine words, if they were translated into French. But for the most part, disaffection and the struggle to voice feelings are sociological as a whole, and not meant to give one gender more illumination than the other. Finding the best poetic representation of communication in his work is daunting, but some are excellent introductory examples, like "Choral." Also, this is a good example of how Auster continually leaves explicit communication at the end of a poem, making the reader go back to make sense of how it fits into the whole.

"Whinnied by flint,
in the dream-gait that cantered you across
the clover-swarmed
militant field:

this bit
of earth that inches up
to us again, shattered
by the shrill, fife-sharp tone
that jousts you open, million-fold,
in your utmost
heretic word.

Slowly,
you dip your finger into the wound
from which my voice
escapes (Auster 70)."

The collection closes with "Notes From a Composition Book (1967)," a collection of thirteen brief passages in which Auster attempts to make sense of the world and language, and, given the date, to potentially provide potential themes of his future works. Of course, these are not set in stone, and given their brevity, it would be far too easy to pick and choose the most adaptable passages. However, the passages are universal to creativity, and not just Mr. Auster's. Mission statements, hypotheses, representations, and conflicting styles are always present in contemporary writing. Writers and critics champion some forms while disparaging others, and vice-versa. Auster is no stranger to being disparaged, yet the breadth of his work and styles manages to illuminate many themes, or at the very least, open various topics to discussion. His tenth note (cited below) manages to convey this, and as a whole, is hard to argue, since it neatly simplifies the act of writing while still leaving it open to its vast potential. I found a lot of good in his poetry, and while there is still much that I haven't read, I'm happy that these early pieces go beyond what I'm familiar with in his canon.

"The eye sees the world in flux. The word is an attempt to arrest the flow, to stabilize it. And yet we persist in trying to translate experience into language. Hence poetry, hence the utterances of daily life. This is the faith that prevents universal despair--an also causes it (Auster 204)."

Work Cited:
Auster, Paul. Collected Poems. Copyright 2004 by Paul Auster.

The Auster Model

Ever since I was in college, my readings have led me to a particular habit that is both good and bad. It's a long-running tendency to claim affinity for an author based on the merits of a single text. This made for some intense praises when I was younger (see: Chuck Palahniuk) and some pretty safe bets as I've gotten a bit older (see: David Mitchell). As I noted last year, I fell in love with Paul Auster's creative non-fiction book The Invention Of Solitude. I explain my thoughts in full detail in the link above, but his thoughts on the nature of writing and the necessity of solitude were incredibly moving and reflective during a period of time when I lived in Washington state. I've long planned a return to Auster's fiction writings, and no matter what my verdict on his novels, the beauty of The Invention Of Solitude will never diminish in my mind.

I recently finished reading his 1989 novel Moon Palace, and beforehand, I read a profile of Auster in the November 30th issue of The New Yorker ("Shallow Graves" by James Wood).Quite a few of my friends are big Auster fans, but as Wood's essay reveals, there are many readers and critics who don't hold the man in high regard. What I thought would be a review of the recently published Invisible turned out to be a scathing look at the writer, his style, and even his positive reviewers:

"The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue (Wood 85)."

Moon Palace tells the story of Marco Stanley Fogg, a young man growing up in the late 1960s. He has never known his father, and his mother died when he was still a child. He lives with his Uncle Victor, an absent-minded yet loving musician and book collector. After his uncle dies, Marco plunges into poverty and solitude, even becoming a "resident" of Central Park. He's saved from an almost certain death by his friend Zimmer and Kitty Wu, a young woman he meets by chance and ends up with in a relationship. After getting back on his feet, Marco gets a job as a companion (and later, biographer) to an elderly, wheelchair-bound man named Thomas Effing. Effing's history and life reveals adventures, mysteries, and in turn, revelations that clear up some of Marco's own confusions and seemingly forgotten history. After re-reading Wood's essay, I was amazed that he didn't cite Moon Palace. Perhaps Auster's other books are better examples, but every critique and complaint had its place in the uncited text. Here is Wood's description of a typical Auster protagonist:

"A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss--a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother (82)."

Yes, Marco is the protagonist, and the novel is written in the first person. Despite his emotions (or sometimes lack thereof) and keen awareness of his own events and surroundings, he feels detached, not so much emotionally, but in a character sense, since virtually everyone in the supporting cast has a history that is just as amazing as his story. Everyone is connected to Marco, even if they don't know each other personally. The two main women in the work are somewhat stereotypical (as Jeff Ignatius commented on my piece "Solitary Pursuits," 'Has Auster written any female protagonists?'). Mrs. Hume, Effing's live-in caretaker, remains in the background, making the occasional appearance to the action at hand, and inexplicably taking the verbal assaults doled out by the old man. Kitty Wu (I cringed every time I read this name in the text) seems to be an early incarnation of Nathan Rabin's "Manic Pixie Dreamgirl:"

"Kitty was the one who finally broke the ice. 'Now that my brother is here,' she said, obviously entering into the spirit of the moment, 'the least we can do is ask him to join us for breakfast.' I wanted to kiss her for having read my mind like that. An awkward moment followed, however, when no extra chair could be found, but Kitty came to the rescue, gesturing for me to sit between her and the person to her right (Auster 36)."

The novel floats between various generations, the American East and West, wild personal histories, family relationships/dysfunctions, and a later manuscript that combines all of these elements (Wood again on an Austerian theme: "A visiting text...is elegantly slid into the host book"). Thomas Effing is either one of the most memorable characters in postmodern literature, or he's one of the most infuriating. With him, some of Wood's complaints are unequivocal. Auster's use of "B-movie atmosphere" is almost the textbook definition of the story of young Thomas Effing.

"He pulled the trigger, and an instant later the man went flying back in his chair, screaming as the bullet hit him in the chest, and then, suddenly, there was no sound from him at all. Effing re-cocked the rifle and pointed it at the second brother, who was hastily trying to scramble out of his bedroll on the floor. Effing killed him with one shot as well, hitting him square in the face with a bullet that tore out the back of his head, carrying it across the room in a spurting mess of brains and bone (Auster 180)."

The bulk of Wood's argument is that Auster's sketches and postmodern usage of cliches are deployed without any irony. However, the more I think about this notion, the more I feel that it's a compliment, at least in the case of Moon Palace. Auster's most blatant wordplays are often explicitly defined and explained in the course of the novel. You probably noticed a very obvious one in this essay: the name Effing. The double meaning is self-explanatory, yet Auster devotes a few sentences of definition. These can be distracting at times, but it seemed as if the hints of irony are being deflated in order to show that the writer is engaged in a strict piece of adventurous, reflective storytelling. For someone like Wood, this can be seen as having one's intelligence insulted.

The biggest distraction, as evidenced in the title, is the use of the moon as a metaphor and a constant presence throughout the work. The moon has always been used in the history of literature, but Auster keeps pointing to it, to the point that any personal meanings or symbolism that a reader could gain from it are lost. It's a classic example of "show, don't tell" rule being broken. Wood may not agree, but there are postives in Auster's fictions, and Moon Palace is no exception. Even if they are a bit sensationalized, his sketches of masculinity are striking and evocative. There's no misogyny here; if the men are assholes, they are unisex in this abrasive behavior. The looks at solitude are especially detailed, even if this acknowledgement blurs the line between the author (since he wrote an entire non-fiction account of solitary moments) and the text.

"I felt like someone about to be reborn, like someone on the brink of discovering a new continent. I watched the counterman go about his business as I smoked another Camel, then turned my attention to the frowsy waitress with the fake red hair. There was something inexpressibly poignant about both of them. I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me, but I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. For the next few minutes, I just sat there in my own euphoria, listening to myself think. My mind was a blithering gush, a pandemonium of rhapsodic thoughts. Then my cigarette burned down to a stub, and I gathered up my forces and moved on (Auster 52)."

Works Cited:
Auster, Paul. Moon Palace. Copyright 1989 by Paul Auster.
Wood, James. "Shallow Graves." Originally published in The New Yorker, November 30th.

Solitary Pursuits

"At that moment the equation became clear to him: the act of writing as an act of memory. For the fact of the matter is, other than the poems themselves, he has not forgotten any of it (Auster 141)."

Forgive me if this essay is heavily tinted with autobiographical asides. One of the reasons I moved to the Seattle area this year was to focus on writing, to make up for the lack of attention that I had been paying. Naturally, I was homesick, which I dealt with by sending long e-mails to friends, happily detailing my newfound focus on writing, coupled with the fascination of exploring a new city, one that I had never even visited before. A friend of mine recommended Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, saying that I would relate to the look at the solitary nature of writing and creativity. After recently finishing the book (a few months after this recommendation), I was immediately reminded of a conversation with another friend of mine, one who found it curious (read: odd) that I enjoyed reading books about writing. I'm amazed at how right these two friends were, both the first one with his accurate recommendation, and the second one with her affirming question. I'll gladly be considered odd.

The Invention of Solitude is composed of two volumes in one. The first half ("Portrait Of An Invisible Man") consists of Auster writing about his father, a man of complex emotions, both infuriating and gently touching, and a man who dealt with a family tragedy which accounted for his makeup (an event that Auster found out about purely by chance). At first, I found this first half extremely compelling and well written, but I was anxiously awaiting the second half of the book for his insights on writing. However, he provided some passages that hit me in the stomach, passages undoubtedly relatable to young male writers and their relationships with their fathers. This is not at all a slight towards female writers, but one of the unspoken themes of this book is abstract masculinity.

"His most common description of me was that I had 'my head in the clouds,' or else that I 'did not have my feet on the ground.' Either way, I must not have seemed very substantial to him, as if I were somehow a vapor or a person not wholly of this world. In his eyes, you became part of the world by working. By definition, work was something that brought in the money. If it did not bring in money, it was not work. Writing, therefore, was not work, especially the writing of poetry. At best it was a hobby, a pleasant way to pass the time in between the things that really mattered. My father thought that I was squandering my gifts, refusing to grow up (61)."

To an extent, these words describe my relationship with my own father. I love him immensely, and he has always supported me, but while I was in college, he kept hinting that I should study business instead of writing. His feelings were totally well-intentioned, that after college I needed something to fall back on. Even to this day, I sometimes feel like I'm still trying to prove that I'm not merely engaging in a hobby, but working on what I really want to do.

The second half of the book is entitled "The Book Of Memory," a collection of fictionalized autobiographical memories, mixed together with personal examples of the solitary writer. This idea can easily be open to outside stereotypes: a disaffected young male, sitting alone in squalor, attempting to create art. While that might describe "A." (Auster's fictionalized version of himself), it's not at all a caricature, but rather personal history and honesty. "Memory is a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: 'a man sat alone in his room' (86)." As brief as this quote is, this is the core of Auster's beginnings and growth as a writer, an idea that is truly universal among artists. Despite the revolving door of acceptance, publication, gallery shows, feedback, critiques, networks, and sharing of creative endeavors, virtually all art begins with a man or a woman alone in a room, engaging in creation. Even after the art has been exposed to the outside world, it will come back around to solitude:

"Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open and close, and its words represent many months, if not years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude (135)."

The quoted passage that opened this essay is crucial to the book, appropriately buried towards the end. While this might seem like an obvious idea, sometimes it is easy to forget that virtually all writing is affected by memories and experiences. This is not to say that all writing has to be autobiographical, nor am I falling on what I've always found to be a horrible piece of advice for beginning writers: "Write what you know." However, memories shape everything that we do. A given piece of writing may have no resemblance or bearing on the author's life, but his or her memories have shaped who they are and how they've come to creating what they have done.

To close, and for the final autobiographical allusion to myself, Auster has a phenomenal description of writers, yet another one that made me nod in agreement. This might have been more appropriate to write about a few months ago, when I first moved to Seattle, but I still sometimes see myself as a singular entity, both where I live and how I see myself as a writer:

"He has spent the greater part of his adult life walking through cities, many of them foreign. He has spent the greater part of his adult life hunched over a small rectangle of wood, concentrating on an even smaller rectangle of white paper. He has spent the greater part of his adult life standing up and sitting down and pacing back and forth. These are the limits of the known world. He listens. When he hears something, he begins to listen again. Then he waits. He watches and waits. And when he begins to see something, he watches and waits again. These are the limits of the known world (96)."

Work Cited:

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. Copyright 1982 by Paul Auster.