‘Deconstructing’ Paul Auster

Only Lord Denning wrote with the skeletal concision of Paul Auster. In fact, I’m convinced that Auster imitates Denning’s determined loathing of the subordinate clause:

‘It was a warm day in June. Muriel Bowles was rambling upon the Weald of Kent. She had planned an amorous meeting. It came to nothing. Rather she was assailed by person/persons unknown. He, she, it, they wielded a blunt instrument against her head. It could have been a cricket stump. She died. Her cuckold widower turned to drink.’

Auster might have written that parody of a Denning closing speech; but had he done so it would not have been a parody and the assailant would have been called Paul Auster - to invalidate the narrative.
 
James Wood critiques Auster’s deadly serious and crashingly dull writing in this week’s New Yorker. Every Auster book looks, sounds and reads the same. A destitute literary genius inflicts a reclusive metropolitan existence upon himself, in unnecessary penance for the traumatic death of a loved one. To fill the time not spent sleeping or engaged on some stroke-inducing writing project, such as a translating Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, the scribbling protagonist drinks heavily and screws hookers (usually black girls who are enduring an even more grisly life in the Bronx). Some wicked contrivance called Paul Auster arrives as a galvanising nemesis, and protagonist and antagonist battle. The protagonist realises the entire story was a fiction, a figment of his imagination. The narrative is exposed; the narrator is unreliable; the book ends.

As Wood notes, clichés are convention among modernists and post-modernists; they present an opportunity to play games. Auster’s singular talent is to do nothing with clichés besides use them. The eminent James Wood is somewhat exercised by Auster’s banality and urges the prolific novelist to stop sharpening his pencil, permanently.

Wood is a shade harsh. City of Glass, the initial instalment of Auster’s acclaimed New York Trilogy, first published in 1985, is exceptionally inventive: meditating on the philosophy of language with reference to early English classics – the KJV, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare etc. Auster’s failing is that, despite the applause when his latest novel escapes the confines of a typewriter in Manhattan, usually at the behest of its nemesis, a sinister figure called Paul Auster, he’s constructed nothing original since.