Sleepless in Vermont
Tom LeClair
September 19, 2008
A few years ago, Paul Auster told an interviewer that “I get the best reviews and the worst reviews of any writer I know.” His previous novel, “Travels in the Scriptorium,” rewarded his best reviewers and other admirers with a reunion of previous Auster characters in a familiar plot of confused identity. With this new one, “Man in the Dark,” Auster takes revenge on his worst reviewers by making his protagonist/narrator a 72-year-old literary critic with multiple miseries. His sister may have committed suicide, his wife has recently died, and his daughter and granddaughter are deeply unhappy. He suffers from insomnia and walks with a crutch because his leg has been mangled in one of those accidents Auster likes to inflict on his characters.
As the longtime book editor of The Boston Globe, August Brill wrote more than 1,500 essays, but he now believes all this work to be “ephemera.” The only book project he ever began, a memoir about and for his family, was abandoned. Although he no longer writes, he tells himself stories in the dark to avoid thinking about the women with whom he lives: a daughter grieving over a broken marriage, and a granddaughter mourning a former boyfriend killed in Iraq. The novel is the narrative of one such sleepless night, a “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” in which Brill invents a character named Owen Brick, a happily married 29-year-old man who wakes up in a parallel contemporary world where the United States is fighting a civil war. This Rip van Brick must cope with separation from his wife, altered conditions — random bombardments, very high inflation, no TV, few cars — and quantum quirks, like running into his teenage “heartthrob.” With this woman’s aid, secessionists from the federal government dictate a mission implausible: Brick must return to the “real” world of 2007 and kill Brill, who has caused the civil war by imagining it.
As the longtime book editor of The Boston Globe, August Brill wrote more than 1,500 essays, but he now believes all this work to be “ephemera.” The only book project he ever began, a memoir about and for his family, was abandoned. Although he no longer writes, he tells himself stories in the dark to avoid thinking about the women with whom he lives: a daughter grieving over a broken marriage, and a granddaughter mourning a former boyfriend killed in Iraq. The novel is the narrative of one such sleepless night, a “Long Night’s Journey Into Day,” in which Brill invents a character named Owen Brick, a happily married 29-year-old man who wakes up in a parallel contemporary world where the United States is fighting a civil war. This Rip van Brick must cope with separation from his wife, altered conditions — random bombardments, very high inflation, no TV, few cars — and quantum quirks, like running into his teenage “heartthrob.” With this woman’s aid, secessionists from the federal government dictate a mission implausible: Brick must return to the “real” world of 2007 and kill Brill, who has caused the civil war by imagining it.
Brick’s story is interrupted by Brill’s memories, by his awareness of physical discomforts and, near dawn, by his granddaughter, who also can’t sleep. She lies down next to him and slowly, persistently, forces him to reveal the most painful part of his past, his betrayals of her beloved grandmother. By morning Brill has, through this nocturnal transmission, finished his memoir.
Invigorated, Brill wants “a farmer’s breakfast.” He doesn’t realize the full extent of the punishment Auster has in store for him. Although a lifelong reader, Brill is in the dark as a storyteller: his alternative-world plot is hackneyed in concept and rickety in execution. But if his account of a war between American liberals and conservatives is sketchily imagined, Brill does no better with his personal materials, confabulated anecdotes rendered in a flat, chronicling style. One of his favorite phrases, which closes the book, is taken from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose: “the weird world rolls on.” The sentence summarizes Brill’s banality and lack of originality, which discourage emotional engagement from anyone not a blood relative.
“Man in the Dark” might be mistaken for a clever mockery of literary critics if the slackness of Brill’s narration didn’t also mar Auster’s other recent fiction. Auster is 61, but the focal characters of his last three novels are figurative or literal old men. The narrator of “Oracle Night” walks like a “shuffling geezer” after a near-fatal illness; the narrator of “Brooklyn Follies” has moved to Park Slope to die; and Mr. Blank of “Travels in the Scriptorium” is a geriatric case. Like Brill, these characters ultimately manage a modest revival, but for long stretches their sensibilities are dull, their perceptions dim, their language fatigued. Feeble figures, they provide a low-energy, high-fiber perpetuation of the Auster brand.
“Man in the Dark” is a slightly new and improved “Travels in the Scriptorium,” which it partially rewrites in a semi-realistic vein. Both B-men occupy a context of imaginary political unrest, and both reveal themselves through their fictionalizing. But the buried associations between Brill’s civil war and the family battles of his past keep “Man in the Dark” within a marginally interesting psychological realm, while “Scriptorium” is a self-regarding and airless authorial game. Yet the superiority of the new novel to “Scriptorium” becomes trivial when “Man in the Dark” is compared with a similar short novel by Max Frisch, “Man in the Holocene,” which is also about an elderly, desperate man who spends a night awake. The scientific and cultural expansiveness of Frisch’s novel make “Man in the Dark” seem narrow and perfunctory.
After, say, 10 books, maybe novelists should be retested, like accident-prone senior citizens renewing their driver’s licenses. Veterans of literary wars would anonymously submit a new manuscript to agents. Of “Man in the Dark,” I think they’d say, “third-rate imitation of Paul Auster.” Then the author might decide to rev up a first-rate imitation of his first-rate early work. Or he might write a fourth-rate attack on literary agents.
Tom LeClair’s fifth novel, “Passing Through,” has just been published.
I didn't liked how the Owen Brick story ended. I was as a feeling of hurry to finish fast with this character, because it was something else to be done. And, since Brick's understandable dissapearance my interest for the rest of the book ceased.
