Columbia Follies

Rs 450

D.H. Lawrence was a good writer. James Joyce was a great writer. That is not to deprecate Lawrence,but to merely acknowledge a ruthlessness of vision that distinguishes the great from the good. If he challenges the reader to work harder,it’s not a semantic,syntactic or narrative posturing. Postmodernism arrived to show how it is all “play”. But even postmodernism’s demolition of the canon and self-referential narratives didn’t ask the experimentalist writer to shout out what game he’s playing — that he was playing the game was enough.

Then came Paul Auster with his New York Trilogy (1987) — an intelligent and important work,eclipsing The Invention of Solitude (1982),his original and real memoir. He became a bestselling author; and he felt the need to make what appeared effortless indeed so. His prose,routinely hailed as “effortless” and “lucid”,reduced its effort towards the authorial imperative of the irreplaceable,unchangeable sentence. Yet,his characters,invariably writers,laboured over their sentences like a real-life Philip Roth. But Auster told good stories; re-using motifs,characters,tropes,injecting himself or an alter-ego into the text,playing around with his narrative loops.

Invisible,Auster’s thirteenth novel,is a de-intensification of his self-contained narrative experiments. Told in four parts from multiple perspectives,the book traverses first,second and third-person narration. The protagonist is Adam Walker,a 20-year-old aspiring student-poet in 1967,who meets the German- and French-speaking Rudolf Born,on a visiting professorship at Columbia. There’s Born’s girlfriend,the silent Margot,with whom he is almost coaxed into an affair by Born. But then Born stabs and kills a mugger on a walk — the pivotal dramatic moment of violence that,as with many Auster protagonists,turns Adam’s life. Born flees,Adam is destroyed by guilt. That’s where Part I ends,and a Columbia buddy of Adam’s,the successful novelist James Freeman,explains it as the beginning of Adam’s memoir. It’s 2007,Adam never became a writer,and is dying of leukaemia: he must get the memoir done,but is blocked.

Born — his literary pedigree over-emphasised and deflated by reference to the medieval Provençal poet Bertran de Born who is punished in Dante’s Inferno — is a postlapsarian continental dandy,educated,charming,cynical,vulnerable before the darkness of his soul. He offers Adam $25,000 to set up a literary magazine,but Adam suspects that Born is never really in earnest. Born is also perhaps a spy on the payroll of the French or the Americans. Adam pursues him to Paris,seeking revenge,moving through several lives,failing,and falling back on the memory of his incest with his sister Gwyn — the one act that brought him close to love (a memory contested by Gwyn),which,like self-knowledge,remains invisible.

Auster’s characters are reduced to an existential abjectness that enables heightened psychological awareness. But the overt literariness would have been better served without the obsessive names-dropping of past masters,without the almost parenthetical explications of what Auster’s just doing. A less overdone narrative and a little more attention to character development,and Paul Auster would still be a bestselling author but much more critically challenging.