Pay It Forward

Norwood
by Charles Portis
1966, Simon and Schuster


This past summer I read an essay from The Believer on the author Charles Portis. I don't recall the specific details of the article now, but I was sufficiently persuaded to run out to the library and procure a copy of his Western True Grit within the week. I devoured that novel in a matter of a day and a half; its protagonist, the young bull-headed Mattie, was one of the most fiercely and humorously written narrators I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know.

What I love about Portis's writing is his eye for wasted words. Portis writes in his character's vernacular and, as such, the text is laden with none of the writerly subtext and imagery one is accustomed to reading in serious adult novels. He in fact utilizes the vernacular to mine it for seeming non sequiturs and other amusing idiosyncrasies of speech.

Norwood is the character whose perspective Portis adopts for relating the narrative. Norwood is a young ex-marine who spends his time working a boring job at a gas station/convenience store. He shares a house with his sister, who is incapable of handling the upkeep after their parents die. Norwood convinces his sister to get a job waitressing and she meets and eventually marries a prissy stuck-up man named Bill Bird who flaunts his education and more advanced militaristic career over Norwood, who responds to his jabs with sullen tolerance.

Eventually Norwood is offered a job driving stolen cars to New York. While he is suspicious of the job, he is also owed a sum of seventy dollars by a former Marine pal who lives in NYC and so Norwood, with singularity of mind, makes off for New York from his hometown in Texas.

En route he encounters a number of amusing setbacks and strange characters (including a former circus midget). Norwood's view of the world is bogged down neither by political correctness nor by bigotry; he accepts the people with whom he crosses paths and is inclined to speak honestly with all of his companions.

Honesty and forthrightness seem to Norwood's staple traits of interpersonal relationships. He professes to most people he meets his aspiration to become His dogged pursuit of the seventy dollars owed to him is not motivated by greed or by indignation. And after collecting on the debt, he promptly loans the money out to a needy acquaintance.

The strength of the book comes from its incredible sense of humor which uses Norwood's small town perspective without ridiculing his naivete. Take for example, this hysterically funny passage from Norwood's first experience with a subway:

The subway was cleaner and more brightly lighted than Norwood had expected, and it moved faster. He jostled his way forward to the front car and looked through the glass with his hands cupped around his face. He was disappointed to find the tunnel so roomy. Only a very fat man could be trapped in it with a train coming. The air smelled of electricity and dirt.

In one of the pedestrian tunnels at the Union Square stop a man was stretched out on the concrete having a fit and forcing people to step around him in the narrow passageway. Norwood watched him as he gave a few terminal jerks and a long sigh. He knew he should look to see if the man had swallowed his tongue, the way they used to have to do with that Eubanks boy in the fifth grade, but he didn't want to put his finger in the man's mouth unless he had to. It was all right for doctors, they didn't care where they put their hands.

The description is fresh but simplistic - and simplistic without being condescendingly folksy. Norwood's ridiculous thoughts take center stage here - the tunnel being dangerous to only the morbidly obese, doctors' lack of concern for hygiene - and yet Portis is not making fun of Norwood's peculiar thoughts.

In this regard, Norwood reminds me a great deal of A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, which also successfully straddled the line between ridiculing his subject. Toole quite clearly dips repeatedly into poking fun at Ignatius Reilly and yet does not objectify him as a buffoon worthy of our derision - Reilly is humanized consistently throughout Toole's novel so that our amusement feels as though it has some element of empathy. Portis walks the other side of the line, refusing to let his reader feel superior to Norwood, but all the while mining him for comedy. Norwood is occasionally played as the perplexed straight man to the characters around him - Bill Bird's urbane syntax, for example, or the intensely neurotic frivolity of his first female companion.

After enjoying in the last year the incredibly funny and brilliant simplicity of both True Grit and Norwood, Charles Portis is quickly becoming a favorite author. I have tried twice now to convince friends to read the former title, with its deliciously toughened self-assured narrator and have yet to be successful in that endeavor. I can only hope someone will be interested enough to investigate Portis's breezily short and utterly delightful Norwood.

Between the Stirrup and the Ground

Brighton Rock

by Graham Greene

1938, Penguin Classics

I first read Graham Greene during my freshman year of college. I spent at the time many weekend mornings checking out books from the Boston Public Library and sitting in the Public Gardens reading for some hours. I remember reading Greene's The End of the Affair in a quite old edition in the fall that year.

So it was with pleasure that I decided to return to Greene at a friend's suggestion. We were at a get-together where Donnie Darko was shown and we both got excited at the scene where Drew Barrymore teaches her English class Greene's story "The Destructors", which both of us loved. She suggested that I borrow her copy of Brighton Rock. We met for drinks later that week and removed the lovely Penguin Classics and as we fawned over the beautiful uncut pages and the jacket flaps, she dropped it into her margarita.

Greene's prose fascinates me. His plots are endlessly palatable and his prose is clean and muscular. Yet, the nearly cinematic tightness of the plot barely conceals churning undercurrents of doubt about human nature and spirituality. Similarly, for all the effectiveness of his sentences ("His room smelt of stale beer") he is not averse to utilizing' the more poetic of his writerly powers ("The huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes").

Brighton Rock, a thriller set in 1930s coastal England, is certainly faithful to both of my ideas about Greene.

The plot of the book is quite engaging. It concerns a gang of hoodlums who murder a newspaper man in the first chapter of the book and their attempts to conceal the crime. An ambitious but naive member of the gang, a young man named Pinkie, becomes over-involved in the process of covering his tracks and his blood lust grows increasingly throughout the novel.

Pinkie is pursued by an unlikely, but dogged, heroine in the form of a lush with conventionally loose morals, Ida. Ida's interest stems from spending an afternoon with the newspaper man before he died and she becomes more involved as Pinkie begins courting a young girl named Rose who may divulge details that would implicate him in the murder.

Through these three characters, Greene explores ideas of religiosity and morality. Pinkie's blood lust becomes increasingly myopic and rageful as the novel progresses. Greene writes him as an amoral child disgusted by sex. He is immature and it is his murder that increasingly lends him confidence and maturity.

Greene contrasts Pinkie's commitment to unholy acts with Rose's Catholic devotion. Rose is likewise written as naive for her sixteen years. Rose attends Mass regularly and is motivated by aspirations toward domesticity which are dashed repeatedly by the cynical Pinkie. Rose is devoted to Pinkie and takes up his defense seemingly as an act of religious devotion. As her devotion to Pinkie's love (which is largely an act of faith on her part, not unlike her former religious mindset) grows, she realizes his guilt in the crimes that guide the plot and, by extension, realizes that her love of god and of Pinkie are mutually exclusive.

Rose and Pinkie are married in a ceremony both regard as a fraud. The wedding, while legally binding, is absent the emotional and cultural trappings of marriage. Rose decides that she is living in mortal sin and rather than denounce her life, decides her sin is too great for an act of contrition to remedy. As such, Rose commits herself fully to her life of sin.

Thoughts of repentance also cross Pinkie's mind as he wonders about the cosmic ramifications of his crimes. Pinkie's contemplation of mortality and morality frames itself in the phrase "between the stirrup and the ground".

Pinkie's cynicism prevents him from considering the afterlife a reward for earthly goodness. As he remarks to himself, "Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust." Sin is derived from an ability to make sense of the world, or to control one's 'destiny'. Pinkie is invigorated by his powers over mortality and is mystified by imagining religious consequences for his actions.

Rose, on the other hand, is so overwhelmingly motivated by her faith in religious consequence that as she begins to stumble towards the path of sin, she entirely disavows her life of faithfulness. Rose views her own soul as irredeemable and as such is able to disregard any moral compunction she experiences. She contemplates her fate as she prepares to commit even more mortal sin:

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil - he tempted her to virtue like a sin... Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions - "you can plead for him at the throne of Grace" - came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful.

Both Pinkie and Rose are damned by their inability to frame religious warnings in their own life experiences. For Rose, Pinkie represents a physical actuality in which she can trust more powerful than the god in which she previously placed that trust; moreover, Pinkie can receive her adoration concretely in ways her deity cannot. For Pinkie, his inability to imagine a physical manifestation of faith is proof of its insignificance. Pinkie instead invests his energy and faith in the murder that exhilarates him physically and emotionally.

What makes Brighton Rock a truly remarkable read is in Greene's creation of the character of Ida. Ida, unlike both of the children, is worldly and perhaps world-weary. Ida's experience has led her away from religion and towards instead a life of conventional sin. Despite her sexual freedom, Ida's moral compass guides her towards a sense of justice and protection of innocence.

Ida is untroubled by concerns of an afterlife, and instead has constructed her own belief system which Greene portrays as entirely superior to the Church's. Where Rose viewed one compromise of morality fatalistically, Ida views morality from a more subjective - and realistic - point of view. Ida's realism prevents her from viewing compromise as necessarily preempting goodness.

In contrast to Pinkie, Ida is also concerned with the time "between the stirrup and the ground" but she finds physical manifestation of the gift of life in sexual contact, in meaningful relationships, and in pursuing her sense of what's right.

Ultimately, Green's novel, while utterly compelling from a superficial stance of readability is quite complex intellectually. Pinkie and Rose represent the failure of Catholic dogma to account for the diversity and complexity of daily life so clearly exemplified by the brassy but steadfast Ida.

Effing the Ineffable

Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
by Adam Bradley
2009, BasicCivitas Books

Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry
by Kenneth Koch
1998, Touchstone Books

A Poetry Handbook
by Mary Oliver
1994, Harvest Books


Recently in the English class I teach, I devoted two full months to the study of poetic devices both linguistic and musical. In preparing for the class, I decided to delve into two proven manuals of poetry both of which have a stronger emphasis on informing for the purpose of inspiring creativity as opposed to dry academic theory. One of these two, Koch's Making Your Own Days, was a re-read from a creative writing class I took in my stint at Boston University.

In addition to these tried and true volumes, I also read Adam Bradley's recently published study of poetic elements in hip hop, thinking it would aid my quest to connect poetry to my students' interests.

These three authors despite the common subject matter have wildly divergent interests and points of emphasis. Bradley spends a great deal of time discussing wordplay, which Oliver and Koch both largely ignore (perhaps this is due to the specific strengths of hip hop lyricism).

Mary Oliver's Handbook is primarily interested in providing a brief history of common elements of the form in order to aid the fledgling writer. Her approach to these elements is delightfully no-nonsense. Her examples of each of the principles she discusses (assonance, for example, or metaphor) are usually confined to the limits of one entire poem and because of this her points are concisely and starkly made.

Her prose, likewise, is straightforward. Her ability to summarize the meaning and purpose of poetic techniques is unparalleled (especially compared with a writer like Laurence Perrine, whose Sound and Sense was also a book I leafed through for insight in crafting my lesson plans).

Koch's Making Your Own Days is similarly no-frills in its approach to poetic elements. Where Oliver is a traditionalist, however, Koch includes such poetic elements as "lying" alongside apostrophe and alliteration. Koch seems to be interested in these more theoretical poetic devices.

Koch's text is also weighed down far more than Oliver's in examples. In the span of any given page, Koch is likely to quote stanzas or lines from four or five poets compared to Oliver's far more muscular (and discerning) selections. Koch also includes an addendum at the back of his book of several dozen complete poems accompanied by some short remarks about each.

Some of these poems are connected to the body of the work and some are there for one's own perusal. The effect, of course, is that Koch assumes we are as driven to devouring poetry as he is (probably a fair assumption). Koch exalts the poets he includes (particularly Frank O'Hara, a personal friend of his from whose poetry comes Koch's title) but ultimately this inability to be more selective weighs down the effectiveness of demonstrating the principles he discusses.

In Book of Rhymes, Adam Bradley takes a far less traditional approach to poetic study even after considering his unusual subject matter (hip hop). Bradley uses a wide variety of hip hop lyrics as well as poetry to illustrate the relationship between the two.

Bradley, through the nature of his topic, emphasizes certain poetic elements (for example, metrics and simile) while entirely ignoring others.

While Bradley's book is quite fascinating, it seems that this fascination stems from the rap itself and Bradley's insights into it. He draws some stunning connections between hip hop and poetry's concern with sound, for example, meticulously dissecting vowel repetition in a Lauryn Hill rhyme. He does make some rather confusing claims as well in his pursuit of establishing hip hop's literary credibility. "While all poetry has its roots in our childhood love of rhyme, this relation is often most visible at the birth of a new poetic movement. This was certainly the case with hip hop," Bradley writes. That sounds all well and good until one thinks about the actual claim he is making. How many "new" poetic movements have there been, truly? And to what extent have they demonstrated the influence of nursery rhymes?

Bradley straddles the awkward line between academic writing and slangy honesty, seemingly to imbue his writing with authority both intellectual and contemporary. The result of these muddled intentions is often laughable.

Rap style, however, is not simply about counting bars or building verses. It's not even about ill metaphors and dope rhymes. It is more than the sum of its forms. In addition to the conscious level of craft, it contains an ineffable quality of art.

Dope rhymes?

Because rap is an oral form, rhythmic errors are even more glaringly apparent. A wack flow is death to rap. Unfortunately, wack rhymes are everywhere, thanks to hip hop's rampant commercialization.

Wack flow?

Despite these amusing lapses into arch academic syntax and desperate-seeming utilization of slang, Bradley's book is well worth the read. His love of hip hop is on par with Koch's effusive excitement for poetry in Making Your Own Days. (Similar too, is Bradley's inclusion of "signifying" (aka dissing) as a poetic device.) Moreover, Bradley spends ample space discussing some of the issues and trends surrounding hip hop. Sexism and homophobia feature prominently amongst violence and over-commercialism as some of Bradley's criticisms of the form and while he is apologetic for these lapses in taste he celebrates his love for rap nonetheless - an attitude I think most lovers of hip hop espouse.

One of Bradley's most winning insights into the mechanics of hip hop is his observation about the disparity between rap and poetry's attitudes towards self-revelation. "The greatest casualty of hip hop's idea of invulnerability may be its capacity to express the full and complex range of human emotion," he writes. It is in insights such as that that Bradley's dual roles as academic and hip hop lover combine gracefully to shed light on the role of art in the world and the lovable limitations of genre writing.

Poetry Corner: McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets

McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets

Edited by Dominic Luxford

2007, McSweeney's Books

In this anthology, the editorial staff picked ten poems by poets they liked. In turn, each of these poets picked a poem of their own they were proud of and then another poem by a living poet whom they admired. This created ten chains of five poets each.

The poets range from writers of whom I've never heard and established poets like John Ashbery, Charles Simic and Kay Ryan

The anthology represents contemporary poets and as such is almost without exception written in free verse. Below is a poem from the anthology by David Berman I particularly admire:

"Now II" by David Berman

I am not in the parlor of a federal brownstone.
I am not a cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds.

I'm on a floor unrecognized by the elevator,
fucked beyond all understanding
like a hacked up police tree
on the outskirts of town.

Father, why does this night
last longer than any other night?

For God is not a secret.

And the brown girl who reads the Bible by the pool
with a bookmark that says "ed called"
or "ed call ed," must know that turtles
are screwed in the snow

and that everything strains to be inevitable
even as it's being killed forever.

And this is also a song.

O I've lied to you so much I can no longer trust you.

Why must we suffer this expensive silence,
aren't we meant to crest in a fury more distinguished?

Because there is my life and there is our life
(which I know to be Your life).

Dear Lord, whom I love so much,
I don't think I can change anymore.

I have burned all my forces at the edge of the city.
I am all dressed up to go away,

and I'm asking You now
if You'd take me as I am.

For God is not a secret,

and this also is a song.

New Year Review

What I Read in 2009

Last year I made a facebook note listing the books I read in 2008 so I figured with about twelve hours to the new year this was a good time for me to reflect on what I read in the last year. I did not read nearly as many books as I did last year or the year before, but it was still a rewarding year for literature.

What follows is a list, in chronological order, of books I finished reading during 2009. There are many titles that are left in progress or were abandoned or half-read. For the sake concision, I have only included McSweeney's (lengthy) quarterly concern and not other literary journals (such as Zoetrope) that I read during the year.

My six favorite books I read this past year are in bold and include a brief description of the book. Other notable titles have asterisks and there are some brief notes about genre for some of the entries.

01. It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth (a really beautiful graphic novel)*
02. Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (non-fiction Christmas present)*
03. Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby (columns about what Hornby reads each month compiled from The Believer)*
04. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (trippy short stories)
05. The Best American Short Stories 2008 by Salman Rushdie
06. Skellig by David Almond (YA novel Hronby wrote about in his book [it's about an angel])*
07. Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson (short stories)
08. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (great novel)*
09. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

NfU is a thrilling tale of anger with society. The narrator is a disturbed, but charming, man who despises the pretensions of the upper class around him and lashes out at the world in what is written as his ranting document.

10. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Issue 30 (the only McSweeney's I finished cover to cover this year)
11. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

MfB is a collection of beautifully crafted stories pondering the funnier and eerier possibilities of the human experience through science fiction and horror genre-writing. Written in gentle, lovel prose about dark, twisted subjects, the collection is a compelling argument for the ability of genre writing to probe the mysteries of existence in the same way as...

12. City of Glass by Paul Auster

CoG is a haunting exploration of the inner mechanics of the human mind and also a eflection on the purpose of literature. It has been described as a "metaphysical detective novel" but this descriptor by no means adequately explains what a trenchant, harrowing experience it is to read, especially with the other two entries in this so-called "New York Trilogy"

13. Ghosts by Paul Auster (part two of a trilogy, weakest entry)
14. The Locked Room by Paul Auster (part three, brilliant)*
15. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (novel)*
16. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (YA novel, taught in my reading class)*
17. Pretties by Scott Westerfeld (its first sequel)
18. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (won the Pultizer, beautiful short stories)*
19. The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (lovely novel)*
20. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower (short stories)
21. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Another example of strong genre-writing this year. HoHH is a disturbing story fraught with tension. The reader cannot help but become psychologically disturbed as the narrator does so. Jackson's real strength here is the emotional complexity of this character, which creates a stronger sense of empathy as the heroine goes slowly mad.

22. Specials by Scott Westerfeld (second sequel)
23. How It Ended by Jay McInerney (collected short stories)
24. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (super cool McCarthyesque novel)*
25. Love and Obstacles: Stories by Aleksandar Hemon (short stories)
26. Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut (novel)
27. The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony (wonderfully weird novel)*
28. Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from The Believer (excellent essays)*
29. The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (excellent detective novel)*
30. Caricature by Daniel Clowes (graphic novel)
31. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson (really cool YA novel)*
32. Run by Ann Patchett (novel)
33. True Grit by Charles Portis

TG is the story of a young woman in the American frontier hell-bent on avenging her father's wrongful murder. What follows is a hysterically funny and yet gripping story of a woman wise perhaps beyond her means who is underestimated by everyone she meets.

34. The Way through Doors by Jesse Ball (metaphysically twisted novel)
35. Oracle Night by Paul Auster (novel)*
36. Couch by Benjamin Parzybok (novel)
37. Castle by J. Robert Lennon (super creepy suspense)*
38. Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem (stories)*
39. Wrong: Stories by Dennis Cooper (twisted gay stories)
40. Fever Chart by Bill Cotter (novel)
41. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

AYR is a chilling meditation of the significance of the creature comforts of identity we use to feel secure in our lives. It is also an incredibly compelling, well-plotted, seemingly conventional contemporary thriller in the best sense of all of those terms.

42. In the Valley of Kings by Terrence Holt (excellent stories)*
43. Animal Soul by Bob Hicok (poems)
44. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (pyschedelic detective novel)*
45. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (novel)*
46. Erased by Jim Krusoe (weird little novel)*
47. Altman: The Oral Biography by Mitchell Zuckoff (biography)*
48. Invisible by Paul Auster (novel)*
49. Heroes by Robert Cormier (YA novel)
50. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (novel)*
51. A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (nonfiction)

Happy New Year, and Happy Reading!

Childhood Nemeses

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
1843, Chapman and Hall
Heroes
by Robert Cormier
1998, Puffin


I have to admit a strong aversion to Dickens. (Perhaps the snob within me is turned off by the lack of complexity in his plots or by his archetypal characters.) So it was with some small amount of dread that I agreed to teach in my reading class his classic A Christmas Carol. My students and I spent three short weeks reading this book (appropriately enough, just before the holiday season) and contrary to my expectations, I was very much enamored with Dickens and all of his trappings.

I also ought to admit a strong attraction to Cormier's work. Two of my all-time favorite children's novels are his brilliant I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War. His prose is emotionally fraught and his characters brooding, a combination seemingly unlikely for young adult fiction - but this is the essence of why his books are so wonderful. Cormier refuses to talk down to his audience and in doing so, he reaches them far more directly than any number of pandering novelists might.

Dickens is by no means a young adult novelist. However, it is a testament to the appeal (and simplicity) of his novels that so many of them have become co-opted for children's enjoyment (think Disney's Oliver & Company). A Christmas Carol is the best example of this, with its plethora of cinematic and theatrical adaptations. Each adaptation seems to get increasingly saccharine and, foolishly, I assumed the novel would follow in tone.

It was with no small amount of surprise that I fell in love with the book. Dickens' eye for detail is incredibly astute and as such his prose is rife with lush passages evoking Scrooge's London. The descriptions grow increasingly bright as the book progresses along with Scrooge's emotional re-birth.

I am sometimes disdainful of books whose sole purpose is to create some sort of world to inhabit for the span of the audience's involvement with the book. (This goes doubly so for film, Cameron's Avatar a perfect example of a film I am reluctant to see.) This is a large part of Dickens' purpose in A Christmas Carol and is perhaps its greatest asset. Dickens creates a full physical environment within which the reader can dwell at length, but his ability to manipulate tone and to evoke mood are equal parts of what makes London seemingly come to life in the book.

A secondary purpose of Dickens' in writing the book, I discovered as I was teaching it, was to chastise England's rich and to motivate them to enact labor reform laws. This was certainly an interesting angle to teach to my students, particularly in connection with Dickens' "rediscovery" of Christmas and the extent to which the Christmas festival was a tool he used to that end.

What makes A Christmas Carol so surprising as a children's literary archetype is that the book is thematically very adult. The book's message of goodwill toward man and to repent for past sins are attitudes intrinsic to childhood. The deeper emotional tensions of regret for those sins and desire for self-improvement are completely lost on children.

This does not impoverish my experience of reading the book, but rather improve it. The expectation of the saccharine ghost story I knew of my childhood was a delightful thing to have dashed.

Cormier's story, on the other hand, was a surprise in its disappointment. Cormier's work has always dealt with serious adolescent themes and his work causes his readers to live up to the standard of emotional empathy that his narratives set. Heroes is no exception to this statement; it is concerned with the aftermath of war and the fleeting torment of love lost.

While portions of the book are quite beautifully narrated, it seems also to be a rather single-minded work. The main character is literally and emotionally scarred from his performance in World War II and returns, disguised, to his hometown to seek revenge on a community "hero".

This dichotomy between the concept of heroism and harsh reality is the central motivating factor in the novel and every chapter pursues to some small degree elaborating on the plot context that elicits this thematic construct.

The chapters eventually begin to lag with the weight of Cormier's snail pacing. The book alternates too regularly between flash back and the present and Cormier's revelatory plot points are meticulously planted despite being an incredibly short book (barely over a hundred pages) it felt as though it were a short story aspiring to greater heights than it warranted.

Obviously, these two works make unlikely bedside-table-mates. But considering my decades-long aversion to Dickens and my hero worship of Cormier, these were revealing books with which to spend some time.

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.