There’s a lovely scene part way through Paul Auster’s latest novel, Invisible, where the main character goes to the cinema with his sister to watch a film. The movie is Carl Dreyer’s 1955 classic, Ordet, and Auster recounts the famous final scene of the movie, where the farm woman who has died in childbirth lies stretched out in an open coffin and the mad brother commands her to ‘Rise up’. As the camera rests on her, she slowly begins to move and eventually opens her eyes and sits up, fully restored to life. Auster writes:
There is a large crowd in the theatre, and half the audience bursts out laughing when they see this miraculous resurrection. You don’t begrudge them their scepticism, but for you it is a transcendental moment, and you sit there clutching your sister’s arm as tears roll down your cheeks. What cannot happen has happened, and you are stunned by what you have witnessed.
What’s interesting about this is that the audience’s response to this moment – half of them laughing and sceptical, the remainder moved by what they’ve seen – also seems like a pretty accurate reflection of the way that Auster’s novels divide readers into sceptics and believers.
Although that division has always been there, of late there seem to be more mocking sceptics than ever before. It’s become rather fashionable in the past couple of years to slag off Auster, with the consensus growing among many critics and readers that he’s either a novelist past his prime (if, indeed, he ever had a prime) or simply a one-trick pony whose repetitions now annoy rather than enthral.
Even among faithful fans, there has been a waning. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a friend who admitted to feeling embarrassed when he thinks about how much he loved Auster’s books back in the day. He’s now convinced that Auster shot his load with the New York Trilogy back in 1987 and has been firing blanks ever since. Considering this same guy once told me he had “religious feelings” about Auster’s 1989 novel, Moon Palace, and you get a sense of how far the Brooklyn-based author has fallen out of favour.
As someone who at one time devoured everything that Auster wrote, I can understand this jadedness. It’s hard to deny that from Mr. Vertigo onwards, there’s been a steady decline in the quality of Auster’s output, with every promise of a slight return to form (The Book of Illusions, Oracle Night) dashed by dross such as The Brooklyn Follies or the execrable Travels in the Scriptorium; a book which reads more like a Paul Auster parody than an actual novel. Even Invisible doesn’t quite cut the mustard, despite having some lovely moments.
Yet after reading the recent broadsides against Auster by James Wood in the New Yorker and by Wood’s acolyte, Leo Robson, in the New Statesman, I was left feeling that Auster had been given a raw deal, and that there was something slightly wrong-footed about their attacks. At first I thought it was to do with the obvious problems they have with Auster’s style. Wood writes:
One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.” There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along.
Wood intends this as a criticism, which is in keeping with his well-established disdain for plot or of anything that even hints of the narrative drive of genre fiction. Far from being a sign of skilful writing, the fact that Auster’s novels “fairly hum along” is here a sign of their weakness. For Wood, style is all, but it is style within a particularly narrow bandwidth. He expends quite a lot of effort trying to point out why, exactly, Auster isn’t up to scratch in this department, but ends up coming across less like an insightful critic and more like some aged pedant making tortuous points about grammar.
While it’s true that it may lack complexity, there is still grace and elegance in Auster’s writing. It is smooth, demotic and readable, and his playful borrowing from the language of B-movies and hardboiled detective fiction is not only nicely done, but, judging by Wood’s piss-poor parody of Auster’s style at the beginning of his review, harder to pull off than it looks.
Of course quibbles about writing style are a matter of taste (unless we’re talking about the truly bad, such as Dan Brown), but after I got past that there was still something about Wood and Robson’s reviews that niggled. I think ultimately it’s to do with the way they both dismiss the one element in Auster’s books that I think make them interesting: his interest in coincidence, chance and mystery.
For Auster, coincidence, chance and the mystery that is engendered by these elements are not just nifty devices or recurring tropes; they are something fundamental to his fiction and to his life. Read some of his non-fiction such as The Book of Memory, The Red Notebook or True Tales of American Life, and you’ll see just how important they are. Random events, chance meetings and bizarre coincidences happen all the time in Auster’s work (and seemingly in his life), and while Wood sees these “accidents” that “visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky” as a sign of the author’s “creative lack”, I think there is something more sophisticated going on here - at least most of the time.
More than a narrative cop-out or some deus ex machina that artificially propels the story along, in his best books these “accidents” combine to create an atmosphere of heightened emotion and mystery which feels very much like life. Doesn’t it sometime feel that amid life’s randomness, the stars occasionally align? That every now and again things happen that make you feel that perhaps there is a mysterious undercurrent of meaning, direction and purpose bubbling away beneath the surface? Wishful thinking, perhaps, and Auster never says otherwise. But it’s this intangible quality, this romantic mystery and willingness to not tick all the boxes that, for me at least, makes Auster a writer whose best work has something emotional, hopeful and strangely powerful about it.
For Robson, however, Auster’s love of mystery is merely a front for his lack of ability: “The romance of the inexplicable has obvious appeal for the writer with limited explanatory powers,” he intones. And maybe he’s right - maybe Auster isn’t up to the job of explanation. But perhaps Auster’s love of mystery, coincidence and enigma also reflects a heartfelt belief in the limits of explanation - and, by extension, in the limits of fiction, of language and of understanding itself.
That sort of openness and humility are not qualities you’ll find much of in the late work of José Saramago, the author whom Wood unfavourably compares Auster to in his piece, and whose recent books feel like little more than cold, predictable and affectless exercises in style. Uncertainty, doubt, and surprise have little place in late Saramago, for whom every mystery – even Death itself in Death At Intervals – can be pinned down, personified and put in its place by the deadening weight of his comically grave cynicism.
It seems to me, then, that whether or not you buy into Auster is ultimately a matter of temperament; of whether you see his concerns as gauche and unsophisticated, or whether you’re willing to at least give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s whether you’re the sort of person who pisses themselves laughing at the end of Ordet, or if you’re someone who finds the climax of that film moving or meaningful.
Like the character watching Ordet in Auster’s novel, I don’t begrudge anyone their skepticism. But I’m also not ashamed to admit that Auster’s books have moved me, and I’m hoping they will do so again.
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