Paul Auster
frustrates my ability to give a simple and straightforward answer as to whether
I like his work or not. I'm not even sure I can explain why I'm so
unaccustomedly tongue-tied on the matter.
But I find myself
in the same predicament after reading "The Brooklyn Follies."
On the one hand,
Auster always draws you irresistibly into his fictional worlds with an engaging
narrative voice and a compelling premise. This is the case in "The
Brooklyn Follies," the story of Nathan Glass, a divorced, embittered,
ex-insurance salesman and cancer survivor. What can be more compelling than a
man who's given up on life? Who's returned to his old childhood home to die?
You figure he's going to find a reason to live and you want to know what that
reason will be. It's one of the best hooks in the fiction business.
So off you go,
following Auster into this novel of failed academics, runaway daughters, art
swindlers, ethereal beauties, eccentric cranks, and earthy, ordinary women
whose treasure chests conceal hearts of pure gold for the man lucky enough and
wise enough to appreciate them. Along the way, however, you run up against what
I always I find sets my teeth on edge about Auster. He's eminently
"readable," his voice is engaging, conversational even...I'll hand
him that. But he's a "casual" prose stylist, at best; at worst, his
prose seems merely sloppy and carelessly thrown across the page like paint
slapped on a pig’s ass. There are the long back stories that can start anywhere
at any time about practically anyone in the narrative, sending you off on a
tangent, and tending, as often as not, to grind the plot down to a halt for
interminable lengths of pages. Then there is the admirable, but embarrassingly
glaring attempt to shoehorn characters of as many different sexual and racial
persuasions as possible into the plot, all described in glowingly noble terms,
so we don't forget what a tolerant guy Auster is...though, all-man as he feels
compelled to point out as when Nathan assures his girlfriend that he'd
"rather lose his right arm than sleep with a man." I mean, really.
I'd have to think that sleeping with practically anyone or anything would be
preferable, at least in theory, to the prospect of losing one's right arm. In
fact, the first thing I'd suspect of anyone who expressed *that* much repulsion
over sleeping with a member of the same sex was a powerful albeit deeply
suppressed and catastrophically sublimated homosexuality.
Auster wears his
political predilections on his sleeve, which would be more annoying if I didn't
in large part share them, but his political views are so often inessential to
the plot and delivered in such an off-the-cuff-every-sane-person-must-agree-with-me
manner that they carry no weight whatsoever as political analysis and would
really rankle, I suspect, if you weren't on Auster's political wavelength to
begin with. Basically, they are just shout-outs to those who already agree with
him, a wink and a nod to another member of the club. But less forgivable than
all of the preceding, however, is the unabashed over-sentimentality. Oh god,
how thick the treacle drips from some of these pages! It's not just excessive;
it's stunningly excessive. It's downright embarrassing in a serious author to
so consistently sound so many false emotional notes, so embarrassingly,
stunningly, unrealistically excessive is the sentimentality at times that you
start to wonder: *Is* Paul Auster a "serious" author?
In the end, I'm
always left on the fence about Auster. I always seem to go back to him, though.
So I have to figure that when all is said and done I like him more than I
don't, that what I consider his negatives are in the last analysis overcome by
his positives.
And the biggest
positive of all is Auster's ability to hone in on a compelling dilemma
archetypal of the human condition. He makes us care about the situation his
character faces because it's an important one--one that we all share. That's
what he does in "The Brooklyn Follies." In Nathan Glass, he has
created an Everyman who is asking the most basic question of all: Why live?
You'd have to be a
pretty uncurious sort to walk away before you hear the answer. Auster knows
this. And he employs what are his considerable storytelling skills--slapdash
prose style and gushing emotions aside--to keep legions of readers, myself
among them, turning the pages. And that, of course, is the first and most
important prerequisite of any successful popular writer, serious or not.
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