Bildungsromance

Invisible
by Paul Auster
2009, Henry Holt


Several years ago, a great friend of mine who has great taste in books bought me a copy of Paul Auster's Book of Illusions as a Christmas present.

That particular book referenced film a great deal and one of the main characters was a silent film director. The book was concerned (as it seems many of Auster's novels are) with the blurring of the line between oneself and one's art and in what ways others' art blurs our own identities. The book addresses the empathetic tendencies lovers of art have to identify themselves with a work of fiction or art.

What does this identification say about the artist's own relationship with his work, which is to be understood as an inimitable expression of self? In Book of Illusions the main character (a writer, working on translations) becomes distracted with the films of a hermit living in self-imposed seclusion from the world.

That book was the first I had read of Auster, a man I nearly revere now for the metaphysical/metafictional brilliance of his work, and I have to admit that I didn't care for it at all.

Suffice to say, my friend was quite disappointed and it was without hesitation that a year or so later I picked up a used paperback of Auster's City of Glass from a library book sale for something like a quarter. As all the books I buy at such events do, it wound up on my shelf for quite some time until I felt inspired by its relative brevity to bring it for some car reading on a road trip to South Carolina last spring.

City of Glass struck me hard. Its central conceit is a mock-noir style detective plot but Auster's exercises in genre-aping lead only to breathtakingly brilliant existential examinations. It felt so obvious to utilize gritty noir thrillers to create a harrowing attack on identity through the degeneration of a detective case, but yet it was entirely an innovation.

So thus began my fascination with Auster and it was with great pleasure that I consumed in a matter of two days his new novel, which takes the guise of a romance-laden bildungsroman to investigate the nature of self-awareness and the blurry lines between fiction and reality.

Invisible takes place alternately in 2008 and in 1967, a formative year in the life of the story's oblique hero Adam Walker. Over the course of three seasons (spring through fall) twenty-year-old Walker trysts with three different-but-the-same women and moves from New York to Paris and back again. He witnesses a brutal attack on a young man where his life was in danger and is ultimately framed for a crime he did not commit.

The novel has considerably more plot than any other of Auster's novels that I have I read. Moreover, the characters in his other works seem to operate largely in a Brechtian mode (I hesitate to use a theatrical term because it demonstrates my utter unfamiliarity with literary theory) in which the characters are representations of ideas and are used by Auster as tools to forward (or subvert) his plot.

In this story the characters, specifically Adam and his several loves, appear as fully fleshed and emotional rounded as any from the pages of, say, an E.M. Forester novel. The central focus of the novel is Adam's intellectual and emotional development into adulthood and Auster has taken this theme seriously.

Adam is a man marked by emotional fragility and intellectual insecurity which he attempts to cover by bluffing an air of intellectual and social sophistication that he does not possess. He smokes cigarettes and writes poetry self-consciously. He meets a pair of European sophisticates with whom he tries to hold his own in cultural discussions.

The pair, a meekly beautiful Parisian woman and her boisterously condescending lover, cause Adam to confront his insecurity. Adam fakes his way through some conversations and confidently asserts his intelligence when given the opportunity; when it comes, however, to more bohemian sexual matters, Adam's confidence is shaken and he fears himself proven a prude.

Adam's relationship with this older man who fancies himself his intellectual patron emphasizes how crucial these events are in Adam's moral development. Adam wishes desperately to please this man but is simultaneously repulsed by his own neediness. He emulates the man but then congratulates himself for the few minute disparities in their beliefs. Adam is attracted to his power and his confidence but is unwilling to permit himself to fully realize this attraction, preferring to hold him at an intellectual arm's length.

These emotional complexities are rarely so apparent in Auster's work. His character typically do not operate in a richly psychological mode and so it was with great surprise that I found myself so thoroughly compelled by them. Adam's lovers are all brought stunningly to life with nuanced characterizations that are striking in their realism.

Auster's prose, too, has taken a turn for the (relatively) more rich. His writing has always been incredibly robust and in some senses, lean. I was particularly taken with a passage at the two-thirds mark of the book that perfectly demonstrates the agility and simplicity of Auster's prose and yet shows the more poetic trend in this work:

Dread has become fact. Innocence has turned into guilt, and hope is a word that rhymes with despair. In every part of Paris, people are jumping out of windows. The metro is flooded with human excrement. The dead are crawling from their graves.

What is so utterly beautiful about this passage is the convergence of Adam's emotional arc and Auster's wonderful choice of setting for this arc: the upheaval in late-60s Paris. This is Adam's memoir, so is he writing from a metaphorical point of view or is he describing the turmoil (otherwise not addresses in the narrative) about him? Are his emotions coloring his description of the events or are the events providing him a context or a catalyst for his self-loathing?

The fact that one is asking so many questions about a character's state of mind in an Auster work is in itself novel; however, this is not to say that Auster has abandoned entirely his bag of meta-fictional tricks.

The narrative is encased (of course) in a larger narrative, which we only discover half-way through the novel. It turns out that part one of the novel, written in first person, are Adam's memoirs written and mailed to a colleague forty years later. The colleague is digesting the work as the actual reader is and the contextual developments of the plot are learned, frustratingly, at a distance through this additional narrator. Part two of the novel, which now seems like a flashback, is written in second person and again punctuated by the colleague's interpretation of the work.

Part three is written in third person as Adam grows increasingly unable to own up to his emotional failures. and the last portion of the book is a diary from one of Adam's lovers written once again in first person.

This development from confessional first person to objective third person follows a trajectory where Adam's colleague is discovering some curious factual inaccuracies and artistic licenses Adam has employed. This seems suggestive of the range of fiction and implies a correlative relationship between age and one's sense of guilt over one's failures of character.

Ultimately it is revealed that the Adam's colleague is publishing Adam's memoirs post-mortem and has changed all the identities to protect reputations while preserving the document's basic veracity. This is a not-unexpected trick of Auster's to once again bring to our attention our complicity in reading novels as psychological artifacts. Auster is winking at us, daring us to ponder whether or not this work is, as is suggested, a thinly disguised experience of someone he knew.

I'm not particularly interested in such useless lines of inquiry but I am once again reminded of Auster's connection between a man's life and the documents he leaves behind. Again and again, his novels are focused on men who leave written records of their lives as their sense of identity slips away or men who are obsessed by documents authored by others.

Adam's colleague is obsessed by such a document and pursues it to its natural conclusion wherein his maddening quest to create a fuller psychological picture ultimately results in his own participation in the act of creation. Adam's colleague resumes Adam's memoir from where it left off and finally writes it himself.

Auster is writing about the beauty of the spell of fiction: the intoxicating combination of one's experiences (lived and imagined) and a readership's imaginary co-authorship - how without a reader's complicity, novels fall flat.

Adam fails in his quest for adulthood and eventually shrivels into a man haunted by his past and becomes, as the novel's title suggests, invisible. Adam becomes increasingly inaccessible as the novel progresses, first by changing the authorial perspective from first to second to third person but in proving unable for his colleague to communicate with outside of tantalizingly cryptic and brief letters. Auster repeatedly reinforces that the reader cannot be satisfied by hearing Adam's story from his mouth, that we must go back to the memoir itself, his work, to experience Adam, an effort which becomes increasingly, gorgeously diluted by authorial perspective: Adam's colleague's, Auster's, our own.

Adam, Auster's first psychologically realistic character, becomes cloudier and drifts away and seems to disappear the more fervently the reader wants to connect with him. In this way, Auster creates a truly lovely, mesmerizing novel.