“He is 70 years old,” goes one line in Paul Auster’s new novel, “and the time for dithering has come to an end.” Auster is 76, and judging from the book, which struggles to work out what it wants to be, has a bit of dithering left in him yet.
Old age, as the future thins out, is a time for looking back, and Baumgartner is a book of memory. Our guide is Sy Baumgartner, a philosophy professor and author living in Princeton, New Jersey, whose almost comical devotion to the life of the mind is introduced when we meet him on the first page “midway through a sentence in the third chapter of a monograph on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms”.
The mind is one thing, but at 70 the body cries out more and more, and within a few pages Sy has fallen down his cellar stairs in the company of a meter reader. Even then he can’t help waxing philosophical, when the meter reader checks for concussion by asking if Sy knows where they are. “Why, we’re here, of course, where we always are — each one of us locked in his or her here from the moment we’re born until the day we die.”
There’s another pain driving Sy mad though, one that leaves him feeling as though “his limbs were ripped off his body, all four of them … He’s a human stump now.” His wife, Anna — “the crackling, effervescent poet he had lived with for close to two thirds of his life” — died almost a decade ago, drowned by a freak wave. (The impact of chance on lives has been an obsession of Auster’s since, at the age of 14, he witnessed a friend being fatally struck by lightning.) Sy is still suffering, and his grief is debilitating, but not so debilitating that he can’t argue with his counsellor, who keeps trying to fit his experience into neat words. “You blame yourself.” “No.”
Fitting experience into words is the writer’s job anyway, and Auster delivers in many respects, giving well-trodden things a fresh perspective. Unable to have children, Sy and Anna became “a pair of slowly ageing kids” themselves. As Sy retreats further into his memories we get a lovely account of his mother’s childhood and her work as a seamstress.
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Auster has always been good at two things. The first is letting a wild story bloom out of a small detail: a wrong number in The New York Trilogy (1987); a man blown up by his own bomb in Leviathan (1992). The second is playful trickery with the reader: the Beckett-like comedy of The Music of Chance (1990); the self-referentiality of Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), which featured returning characters from his earlier novels. Baumgartner, though full of nice things, doesn’t live up to Auster’s best work. Rather than moving out from its starting point, it turns inward.
The cross-pollination that was a fun game in his earlier work (he even had one of his characters marry the narrator of his wife Siri Hustvedt’s debut novel) seems merely gestural here. Anna’s full name is Anna Blume, the same as the narrator of Auster’s 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things; Sy’s mother’s maiden name is Auster; and the characters Miles and Morris Heller from his 2010 novel Sunset Park are name-checked, all for no clear purpose. One section of the book, about Sy’s trip to Ukraine in 2017, was previously published by Auster as a personal essay.
In the end Baumgartner feels not so much like a novel as one of the scrapbooks of memories that Auster has published, such as Winter Journal (2012). It has an elegiac quality to it, which is pleasing in itself but it isn’t quite enough. Even the excellent and surprising final page works mostly, alas, as a poignant reminder of how good he used to be.
Baumgartner by Paul Auster, Faber, 208pp; £18.99. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Five of the best by Paul Auster
The Invention of Solitude (1982)
Auster’s first book of prose is a brilliant and moving memoir of his late father. After his death, Auster finds that his dad’s new car had 67 miles on the clock, the same as his age. “The brevity of it sickened me. As if that were the distance between life and death. A tiny trip, hardly longer than a drive to the next town.”
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The New York Trilogy (1987)
His breakthrough book is a trilogy of mystery stories with a postmodern twist: “Kafka goes gumshoe,” his editor said. Its blend of the familiar and the strange seduced a generation of young and excitable geekish readers in the 1980s and 1990s, just as JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon had in the decades before.
The Book of Illusions (2002)
Auster’s best novel. It blends everything he’s interested in to a perfect pitch — stories within stories, surprise and chance, recurring characters — in the tale of a man who becomes obsessed with a silent film star from the 1920s whose mysterious life seems to parallel aspects of his own.
Oracle Night (2003)
Perhaps Auster’s most playful and self-referential novel, if you like that sort of thing. “A taut, impressive novel, with menace humming right from its outset,” the Times’s critic said when it was published. But even at his most involved, Auster never forgets to tell a compelling story.
The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
The other side of Auster, this is his best “straight” novel — no talking dogs, no future dystopias and absolutely no postmodern paddywhackery. A wildly implausible but deliciously gripping tale of religious cults, art forgery, abandoned children and blackmail. Sometimes it seems as if he’s making it up as he goes along, but it isn’t half fun.
