Book Review: Paul Auster, Winter Journal

This article was first published at Blogcritics

In Winter Journal novelist Paul Auster, at age 65, turns to the memoir to chronicle what he calls his "phenomenology of breathing."  He takes the reader on a trip through a maze of scattered moments of his life, the people, places and events that played some part in turning him into the man he has become now that he has reached the winter of his content.  They are not ordered chronologically indeed their arrangement may well seem at times haphazard.  Some are treated at length, some merely mentioned, but taken together they create a complex mosaic of a complex man. 

In a sense, the book is Auster's attempt to come to terms with the body/spirit dichotomy that haunts so much of literature and becomes even more evident as one ages and physical decay inevitably sets in.  Over and over again he focuses on the fragility of the body and its demeaning functions from childhood to old age almost as if to prove to himself that old or young mankind is universally subject to betrayal by the body.  He is not all that much different in his 60s from when he was five and couldn't keep control of his bladder.  So we get stories of how his cheek was torn apart while horsing around in a mall, and how he nearly gets his whole family killed in a car accident.  We hear about how he gets crabs from an old girl friend, and how a swallowed fish bone lands him in a French hospital.  Death is just around the corner for all human animals; in that sense age is irrelevant.

In essence a man needs to be reminded that he is little more than a link ahead on that great chain of being. He tells a story about a woman introduced to James Joyce who asks to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses.  Joyce extends his hand and says the hand has done many other things.  Auster then goes on to list some of the myriad things the hand may well have done, everything from masturbating to wiping one's backside and visiting all sorts of bodily orifices, one's own as well as those of others.  What better anecdote to illustrate the duality at the heart of the human condition: the hand that writes sublime literature is the hand that picks the nose.  Winter Journal is Auster's attempt to come to terms with that duality.

Although there are a lot of short journal entries describing specific moments, there are some more extended entries. Perhaps the most intense is his description of his mother's death and its aftermath.  In some sense its emotional impact and its effect on him explains his need to deal with aging and imminent death.  There is also a lengthy section describing the plot of the movie D. O. A., a film about what is essentially a walking dead man, which may well serve  as a metaphor for the human condition.  The longest section is what amounts to annotated list of all the permanent homes—apartments and houses—that he has lived in over the years (20 by his count).  It is only one of a number of lists that appear sporadically through the book: the places he has visited, the foods he ate as a child, not to mention the things one does with one's hands. 

The journal form gives the appearance of something merely thrown together, but I suspect this is far from the truth.  This "phenomenology of breathing" is also "a catalogue of sensory data." Its connections are sensual rather than logical.  "Writing," he says near the very end of the book, "begins in the body, it is the music of the body." It is interesting that the one aspect of his life least often talked about in the book is his writing. Driving snow and biting wind are as important in their own way as his novels and poetry. The maid's room without a bathroom in Paris overlooking the Louvre is as formative, if not more so, as the year in graduate school at Columbia.  If a man is the sum of his experience, all that experience is significant. 

There have been times when I have complained about the vanity of authors of all stripes with the temerity to think that their navel gazing is worth a reader's precious time.  It is one thing for a biographer to decide that a subject's life is worthy of public attention; it is quite another for the subject himself to make that decision.  On the other hand, there is certainly something to be said for a book that tries to make an honest assessment of one's own life, "to examine what it has felt like to live inside" your body.  This is especially true if the life we are talking about is the life of a sensitive, articulate human being who recognizes not only his own unique individuality, but the fact that his experience is the experience of us all.

Book Review: Sunset Park, by Paul Auster

Article first published as Book Review: Sunset Park by Paul Auster on Blogcritics.

Paul Auster returns to Brooklyn in his 2010 novel, Sunset Park, although not with the same kind of enigmatic Kafkaesque overtones of his earlier visits. His characters are faced less with an incomprehensible world neither they nor we can understand, than they are victims of their own fears and insecurities. Reminiscent of the group hero featured in some of the naturalistic dramas of the last century, the novel is less about one central figure than it is about a set of people, four squatters in an abandoned house in a run-down Brooklyn neighborhood and the family of one of those squatters. Different sections of the book are told from the point of view of six different characters.

While these are all different kinds of people in many respects--a young woman who sells real estate, a graduate student writing her dissertation, a college drop out in love with a teen ager, a musician "wannabee" who runs a fix it shop, an independent publisher, and an aging actress—they all have one thing in common. In one way or another they are all wounded beings. Indeed, in one way or another, the wound is the dominant thematic trope of the novel. From the time the idea is developed in a schoolboy's essay on To Kill a Mockingbird and its reiterations in a variety of discussions of the classic forties film The Best Years of Our Lives and the emphasis on injury ending career of Cleveland Indian pitcher, Herb Score and others, it is made clear that wounds are endemic to life. As one character asserts, "wounds are an essential part of life, and until you are wounded in some way, you cannot become a man." It is the necessity to go on living in spite of one's wounds that is man's burden and in some sense his blessing. It is in overcoming one's wounds, physical or emotional, that one realizes his or her potential as a human being.

If there is a central character in the book, it is Miles Heller. Son of the publisher and the actress who were divorced soon after his birth, he has left school and broken off all contact with his family as a result of intense guilt over the death of his step brother. When the novel begins, he is living in Florida, working as a trash remover in houses which have been foreclosed on, and having an affair with an underage teen. He returns to Brooklyn to live as a squatter in Sunset Park with Bing, an old friend and two other women, Alice and Ellen, who had been roommates in college. All four are more or less emotionally wounded in one way or another, as are Miles' parents, and all of them must find a way to live in spite of those wounds.

But it is not only the characters that are wounded. The world that they live in is wounded as well. It is a world where a financial crisis has put people on the streets collecting cans and bottles for the deposit money, where the publishing industry is going down the drain, where dissidents are not tolerated. It is a world where the broken and old, everything from typewriters and houses to people are simply abandoned and left to rot, where the dead are buried and forgotten. Auster has written a compelling critique of our modern society and its effects on the people who are doomed to live out their lives in it. Whether or not it is possible to live productively and meaningfully in such a world is the question, it is a question that may or may not have an answer by the time you get to the end of Sunset Park.

Paul Auster is a truly exciting writer and in Sunset Park, he is at the top of his game. He creates characters that are human in their flaws and their passions. He puts them in situations that test their humanity. He writes with a style that is both literate and accessible. He is a novelist to be reckoned with.