Review: Man in the Dark
Paul Auster
(Henry Holt, August 2008)
In Paul Auster’s inventive new novel Man in the Dark, an aging writer named August Brill narrates stories over the course of a single long night to keep his mind off a devastating series of recent family tragedies; near dawn, his granddaughter joins him for an intimate pre-dawn conversation. In the hands of a less gifted writer this would be barely a short story, yet upon this slender armature Auster hangs a tale that incorporates magic realism, science fiction, Kierkegaardian dread, postmodern metafiction, and a burning evocation of the terrors and dislocations of war.
The strongest part of the book is the story-within-a-story that the insomnia-wracked Brill makes up on the fly, a Vonnegutian whopper about a man who is transplanted to a parallel reality where the United States is mired in a brutal civil war. The crabwise relation between story and creator—a familiar theme for Auster, beautifully handled here—invests the episode with a dreamlike anti-logic that recalls Flann O’Brien. The adventures of Brill’s creation (tellingly, a magician named Brick) tap the primal power of one of the most enduring scenarios in science fiction: that of the outsider suddenly transplanted to an alien world. Brick’s bizarre experience in this alternate America mirrors the strangeness of post-9/11 life without slopping over into the didactic or obvious: Auster leaves the reader to register his own emotional response to this peculiar fable. Unfortunately, Brill grows tired of his jeu d’esprit and abruptly truncates it, returning to the obsessive plumbing of his grief.
When Brill is joined near the end of his restless night by his granddaughter Katya, equally shattered and adrift, he relates the story of his courtship and long marriage to his recently deceased wife in a sustained gulp of anguished reminiscence. Katya responds with some deep secrets of her own, and despite some tinny dialogue (“Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?” “Because it is, that’s all. It just is.”), the cross-generational connection between these two damaged souls is both odd and touching. Man in the Dark’s sole glimpse of surcease comes in the halting reassurances the two offer each other.
Although Auster’s prose is precise and burnished, at the heart of August Brill’s meditations lies a self-absorption and petulance that eventually feels weary and circular. Brill’s mind is a claustrophobic place, and no amount of mental games and allusions can fully open it up—readers can be forgiven if they occasionally wish that the guy would just fall asleep, already. More to the point, the horrific tragedies he has endured do not necessarily make his pain feel earned, and Auster’s inclusion of several unrelated vignettes of catastrophe, riot, and war feels like piling on. Still, this somber, elegant book, rife with nuances and subtle echoes, crisscrosses the line between memory and loss, reaches for the profound, and very nearly finds it.
From Rain Taxi, Fall 2008, Volume 13, No. 3