Man in the Dark

Having recently spent several weeks in a (relatively) incapacitated state, I can recognize a bit of myself in August Brill, the protagonist and narrator or Paul Auster's Man in the Dark. In that state, your late-night thoughts can zip off in unexpected trajectories, and you might populate your closed room with "company" of your own invention. Stories are what you got. Convalescing at his adult daughter's home, 72-year-old literary critic Brill is suffering with a leg shattered in an automobile accident, and spends his days and (sleepless) nights in bed, either staring upwards at the ceiling, or binge-watching an endless series of arthouse films with his film student granddaughter. He's prey to sadness, self-mockery, concern for his rudderless family, and ironic nostalgia for the 1950s (his decade of youth, first love, marriage and wide-open personal vistas).

Brill's self-dealt narratives touch upon an alternate-history United States, where the September 11th attacks never occurred but the country fell into a (hot) civil war spurred on by unrest following the 2000 presidential election. The dimension-hopping protagonist of his scenario, Owen Brick, is given an ultimatum by the ruling powers of his world - to assassinate the "dreamer" who brought the civil war into being, and restore balance and peace to their particular universe. But complications abound. In between bouts of self-doubt and personal recrimination, Brill sifts through the receipts of a complicated life: marriage, infidelity, thwarted hopes and the kind of personal realizations that (hopefully) come later in life rather than not at all.

Man in the Dark was a welcome relief (read immediately upon the heels of a particular mass-market potboiler), thoughtful and thought-provoking. Combines a sense of melancholy, well-observed intergenerational family dynamics, and a sense of acceptance of both responsibility and irresponsibility.

A recently widowed writer, whose name by pure chance sounds a lot like "Paul Auster", lies on his back in a dark room. A car accident has temporarily disabled him, and so now he spends his nights sleepless on his daughter's couch in Vermont, telling himself stories to pass the time. Upstairs, his divorced daughter and recently bereaved granddaughter (her boyfriend never came back from Iraq) lie, presumably sleeping, as August Brill (for 'tis his name) makes up a story about a young man who wakes up in a hole to find that the USA is at war with itself. In the alternate universe that Brill made up for him, 9/11 never happened and instead the repercussions of the 2000 election led to full-blown civil war between the liberal coast states and conservative (not to mention much better armed) middle America. The young man is told that only he can stop the war. How? Kill the old bastard who's lying on a couch in Vermont making it all up.

Stories within stories, obvious author avatars, seemingly random accidents that throw an entire life out of whack, metaphysical ruminations on how we create our own world... everything is business as usual in the country of Austeria, right?

Well, maybe not. I've been wanting Auster to get back to this kind of willfully too-cleverly metafictional and yet gripping stories he used to do so well; his last two novels - the pleasant but rather pointless Brooklyn Follies and the ridiculously navelgazing Travels In The Scriptorium - had their good sides, but where one had very little for Auster fans to enjoy and the other had very little for anyone who's not a complete Austroholic, in Man In The Dark he manages to get the balance back.

So why don't I love it?

I really should. It's a very clever book. The various storylines - and boy, does he manage to pack a few into less than 200 pages - continuously refer back to the same dead objects and dead people that the novel's characters discuss in their analyses of movies; like his last two novels (and like his wife Siri Hustvedt's excellent The Sorrows of an American), 9/11 and the mad decade that's followed it remain an almost unspoken absence in the centre, just like Brill's and his granddaughter's grief is held off until the very end. It's all about how to get through without losing yourself, how to survive that private/public civil war without one side crushing the other but by finding a way to keep going. Also, this is arguably that rare beast: an Auster novel where nothing happens by chance. The setup, with our narrator incapacitated following a car accident, looks like one - until he retraces his steps and realizes what brought him here, and suddenly nothing looks random anymore. It's a trick that carries a double edge, though, since that's exactly what his granddaughter does too - and ends up with a conclusion that almost destroys her, that everything is her fault. When Brill throws his writer's quill in frustration, it's both an acknowledgement of how useless mere Story can seem (the bookstores and TV stations in New York and LA are no match for bombs, an against-all-odds love story doesn't stop cancer) and one a powerful restatement of how indespensible it is in knowing who we are. Because obviously, even when Brill gives up his attempts at fiction, Auster continues his. And as long as he does, this preposterous world keeps a-spinning.

So why don't I love it?

In a lot of ways, this is probably both the key to Auster's latest couple of efforts and to whatever is to come; a reboot. He has taken apart his fiction machine, polished and reconditioned each part individually, and then put them back together into something similar to the old one but with some new features. And that I love. But I expect a lot of Auster, and there's still some bugs to work out. Man In The Dark is a very nice novel, but it doesn't soar, damnit. When I reach the end it feels like it's not done; it's too short, too sprawling, with ideas and substories that barely have time to develop into anything but an obvious illustration of his theme before he ditches them; as if he suddenly has so much to say he can't figure out where to start or end. That gives me a lot of hope for his future novels, but for this particular one, I can't really love it.