Book Review: The Storyteller

Fiction: The Storyteller
By Anna Wainwright
Paul Auster, Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, 2008)

It sometimes seems as though Paul Auster is trying to single-handedly keep the literary tradition of mise en abyme alive. His latest novel, Man in the Dark, offers readers another story within a story about a writer’s dependence on his own creations, and his subjection to their whims and fancies. Auster has explored this theme before: In Travels in the Scriptorium, published only a year and a half ago, many of Auster’s past characters reappear to speak with an anonymous Mr. Blank, arguably a stand-in for the author himself. In The New York Trilogy, a detective spies on a man who sits in a room all day writing the story of the detective himself. The sense of writing being a dangerous, life-or-death activity appears again and again in his work.

In classic Auster fashion, Man in the Dark’s main character is a writer, in this case a successful book critic named August Brill, a man complete with a Pulitzer and a list of healthy neuroses. This time, however, Auster has positioned his protagonist in a larger, more complex world. Mr. Blank sat in a room alone, unaware of who he was or whence he came. The characters in The New York Trilogy ran around New York City in a provincial panic. Brill and his relations live in present-day America, plagued by illness, injury, heartbreak, and the malevolence of the current political climate. August’s wonderful French wife has just succumbed to cancer. His daughter writes a biography of the unhappily untalented Rose Hawthorne, daughter of the genius Nathaniel. His granddaughter’s lover has just been executed in Iraq. And that same granddaughter, grief-stricken and tormented, sits on the couch all day, watching foreign movies to numb her pain.

August Brill distracts himself from his own torments by inventing the story of a man named Owen Brick. Brick’s story is set in a different America: the character is transported from our post-9/11 world to a post-apocalyptic parallel universe in which September 11th did not happen. In this world, a violent secession followed the 2000 election, resulting in a bloody, ongoing civil war between the U.S. and the “Independent States of America,” a nation made up of the blue states of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, etc. Brick is unsure why he is in this post-apocalyptic, desolate America, where millions have been killed—in this America, the war is being fought at home.

This being Auster, Brick is made aware of August Brill. This dismal world is being created by Mr. Brill himself, after all, and Brick has been transported to this world as an assassin. If a writer can wreak havoc on his characters, it seems, his characters can also kill their maker.

The merging of these two worlds—Brill’s complicated existence in our own dimension, and the profound misery that permeates Brick’s alternate reality—is beautifully done, but what is most interesting is the reflection of Brill’s imaginary world on his real one. To escape his own sadness, to “battle against himself in the trenches of night,” he has created a world filled with violence and hate into which he escapes. He has made himself a cruel despot, he has created characters who wish to kill him; his fantasy is, as Brick realizes, a fantasy of suicide.

When Brill allows his fantasies to recede and his real life emerges in the foreground of the novel, the book becomes a touching and thoughtful portrait of a man at the end of his life. His mind is intact, but his body has been crushed by a car accident and age. His wife is dead and his career is stalled. These personal tragedies are compounded by the greater dramas in the world surrounding him. There may be no civil war on American soil, but the threat of danger is palpable, the real war Brill’s country has instigated is luridly present every night on the television screen. He continually recedes into his own past, where there was no war, where the dramas were personal: adultery, career, fatherhood. The reader is transported into his past as well, another parallel universe both author and protagonist can control. Brill cannot control his present, no more than Auster can control the world outside his fiction. “Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?” Brill’s granddaughter asks. Brill replies,“Because it is, that’s all. It just is.”

Man in the Dark rubs the reader’s nose in the horrors of life; and yet, as he has done before and is sure to do again, Auster injects just enough love and mystery into his characters’ lives to make it all seem worthwhile.

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/books/the-storyteller

Book Review: Travels in the Scriptorium

Fiction
By Anna Wainwright
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium (Picador, 2007)

Travels in the Scriptorium, Paul Auster’s latest novel, is a beautiful and chilling little book. The style is spare, philosophical. A man sits alone in a room, not sure of who he is, where he is or what he is doing there. He is unaware of the fact that he is under constant surveillance, both audio and video. He is completely unfamiliar with all the mechanisms of his body. His name is Mr. Blank.

The novel is a reverse caper of sorts. An Orwellian manuscript, author unknown, is in the room for Mr. Blank to read and decipher. He is visited, in his small space, by a variety of characters both eerily familiar to him and totally new. A devoted Auster reader will recognize the characters from his earlier works: Anna Blume from In the Country of Last Things, Peter Stillman of City of Glass and David Zimmer from The Book of Illusions, among others; all make cameos both onstage and off. These characters drop clues as to why they are visiting him; most notably, it is made clear that he has wronged Anna somehow, and is responsible for her suffering. The characters keep coming, the manuscript is read, Mr. Blank relearns how to urinate, defecate, vomit and orgasm again. He begins to piece together the puzzle, and discover how he relates to all these people entering and leaving his room.

I was reminded when reading Scriptorium of a passage in Ghosts, the second novella in The New York Trilogy: “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.”

Auster is known for his obsession with stories within stories. Writers abound in his tales, and find themselves in precarious, even life-or-death situations not generally associated with the literary lifestyle. His great skill is in dosing literature with peril. Scriptorium gives authority to the many characters that Auster himself has, over the years, put through insanity, despair, even death. In some sense, the author has allowed his characters to finally grant him his own comeuppance. After all, he seems to ask the reader, what life does a writer have without his characters?

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/03/books/prose-roundup-march-08

Book Review: Hocus Potus

Fiction: Love the Bomb

By Anna Wainwright

Malcolm Macpherson, Hocus Potus (Melville House Publishing, 2007)

As the country settles uneasily into the fourth year of the Iraq war, and the population learns more and more each day about the fiction spun by the Bush administration, television, film and literary fiction have entered the fray. Last year, Clare Messud’s The Emperor’s Children incorporated September 11th into a narrative, detailing the effects of the terrorist attack on the lives of bourgeois, self-involved Manhattanites, and Sally Field watched her son go off to war on the glossy television show Brothers and Sisters. This year, the New York Times reported in September, Hollywood will offer mainstream America a slew of movies about the war itself, applying the Technicolor war imagery of Saving Private Ryan to a current conflict with no end in sight. A public focused on American Idol and Lindsay Lohan will have to contend with films such as In the Valley of Elah and Lions for Lambs and their consciences if they just stay home.

In the ranks: Malcolm Macpherson’s new novel, Hocus Potus, a brave and successful attempt at absurd realism. Labeled “the Catch 22 of the Iraq War” by Melville House, the novel resembles more of a Dr. Strangelove, blending fantasy with the stark apocalyptic reality of a nation at war at home and abroad.

Hocus Potus introduces a group of 21st-century lost souls, American opportunists who set off for Iraq with motley hopes and dark dreams. There is Rick, a modern-day Thomas Crowne, charismatic and mischievous, flirtatious and dark; Glennis, a bombshell pilot with a greed problem; McNeil, the pothead physicist; Kristin, the OCD young Yalie determined to work her way up in the current administration. All are stuck in Iraq, volunteer prisoners of POTUS (the President of the United States), and all are consumed with the futile hunt for the missing weapons of mass destruction.

Macpherson is a clever writer, and his narrative is written with the assurance only someone who truly believes in his subject matter can muster. All Americans know what the war feels like at home. Only an unlucky few, however, have a sense of what it feels like over there. We do not know the terror of checkpoints, the stench of the desert prisons, the strangeness of swimming in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool. These images, interspersed throughout the novel, lend a stark and pathetic beauty to a fast-paced, darkly comic plot.

Hocus Potus is, in the truest sense, a caper, and a brutal look into the search for, and the fabrication of WMDs. Much like Kubrick’s “love the bomb” slogan, Hocus Potus expresses the warped desire for the big kaboom yet to come. Humans crave purpose; if there is none, it must be invented.

Despite its fantastical elements, what is most effective in Macpherson’s novel is his insistence on the real problem of Bush’s war: there is no justification; we are only fanning the flames of hatred and violence. The novel ends on a disturbing note: in a presidential address at the UN, POTUS announces that WMDs will be found, finally, within days. Rather than receiving the expected “rolling thunder of applause,” he is greeted with scattered clapping and angry silence. The world Machpherson has created, it seems, is as wary of American lies as the real one.

https://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/10/books/fiction-love-the-bomb

Book Review: Wordplay

The Brooklyn Rail, June 2007
Literature: Wordplay
by Anna Wainwright
Johannah Rodgers, sentences (Red Dust, 2007)

In “How to Think Like Leonardo Da’vinci,” a word “drawing” from Johannah Rodgers’s new book sentences, the author speaks of “fitting one’s life to a narrative.” On a first reading, sentences seems essentially narrative-less. It is a series of word sketches, pages intermittently filled with prose and sparse with Cummingsesque poems. And yet, for all superficial haphazardness, Rodgers has given us a work of earnest completeness.

Early in the book, in the piece “Before Afternoon,” Rodgers offers the reader a scene of a woman on a porch, alone with a drink and her thoughts. The scene seems, at the outset, a fairly typical narrative description of melancholia: the woman’s thoughts drift over the weather, the time of day, her marriage, her past sexual history. Only after several paragraphs does one recognize a pattern; the same sentences begin to repeat, over and over, in different combinations. It is a bold maneuver; once a reader has discovered the trick, will he be able to keep his eyes from glazing over? Yet Rodgers succeeds in her boldness, arranging the sentences like puzzle pieces, each configuration creating new meaning, a different paragraph, pushing the story forward. By the end of the three-page riff, the reader does not feel manipulated, but exhilarated.

Rodgers packs a great deal into this slim volume: stories, poems, quotations from other writers. The book opens with a quotation from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a sort of warning: “In fact we do the most various things with our sentences. Think of the exclamations alone, with their completely different functions:

Water! Away! Ow! Help! Fire! No!”

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 27

The philosopher’s playful words serve as a generous way to usher us into a book thats both daring and gentle. Unlike much experimental prose, Sentences is not out to prove the reader wrong, and Rodgers does not approach her text with any belligerence. Rather, she treats the book as a sort of journal, a conduit for her thoughts and her glorious imagination. She intersperses dense sections of text with pages empty but for fifty-odd words, handwritten sentences, and messages to friends. The blank space gives the reader room to breathe, but it also keeps us on our toes, as we wait for the next page to hand us something completely different. Rodgers expects a great deal from her readers, but always rewards them for their efforts. In “And/Or: A Novel,” she creates a chart of actions and consequences, and includes a demanding footnote, instructing her audience to read both horizontally and vertically to reach a number of different resolutions. Though initially daunting, her hard work makes it easy on us, and we’re left giggling.

Though the text is often disjointed, Rodgers remains true to a few themes throughout her work: love, the complexity of living, and wordplay. In “On Writing (1998-2005),” the author claims “writing is a fetish,” and that “writing is the process of bringing things into focus while using a very dirty lens, i.e. language…” Certainly, Rodgers fetishizes narrative in her work. The words she uses at times seem not as important as the order in which they are placed, the space on the page which they occupy. And yet the space between the words themselves also cleanses the text and treats language not as a dirty lens, but one of crystalline clarity. By the use of repetition in “Before Afternoon,” perhaps Rodgers is able to offer a more pristine view of her character than she could were she using a traditional narrative structure. Words certainly run disjointedly through the mind. Why not over the page?