Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel may leave those who haven’t read his previous
fourteen feeling oddly unqualified, for Invisible ideally demands a certain
kind of reader: someone literary and intellectual; someone mesmerized by
puzzles and Möbius strips; someone with an interest in all things Lacanian,
a soupçon of Francophilia and a receptivity to High Postmodernism. Even if
you don’t have these requirements, the novel offers delicate rewards, but
appreciating them needs a patient willingness to inhabit what one character
terms “the land of If”, a slippery world of contingency, of endless
unanswerables, of missing and, yes, invisible authors of words and deeds.
We first meet the novel’s protagonist, Adam Walker, as a twenty-year-old
student at Columbia University in the tumultuous spring of 1967, just before
the Summer of Love. He is an aspiring poet, but what matters more than what
he is, is what he does: like most characters in Invisible, he authors. Even
his memory of his dead seven-year-old brother centres on a heartbreaking
note little Andy had penned.
Adam describes himself as a “know-nothing boy”, but he possesses an uncommonly
mature knowledge of fine wines, medieval Provençal poetry and carnal
pleasures. Auster presents specks of historical context – the war in
Vietnam, the draft, growing urban unrest – but telescopically. We are mainly
down in the potent muck of Adam’s narcissism, sexual fervour and his
compulsion to write, in all senses of the word, his life.
It is soon suggested that much of the first three of the book’s four parts
form Adam’s memoir within the novel, in a typically twice-removed narrative
scheme familiar to Auster’s readers. (The precise conceit that delivers the
memoir’s text to us, which I will not spoil, hinges on another
author/reader, Adam’s college acquaintance, Jim Freeman.) Also familiar are
the menacing expectancy, smeared memories and empirical bafflement that
almost immediately surround Adam. When he describes meeting his nemesis, a
Franco-Swiss international studies professor at Columbia named Rudolf Born,
and Born’s mysteriously quiet “special friend” Margot Jouffroy, at a party,
he can barely remember where or why they were there.
"I have no memory of why I was there. Someone must have asked me to go
along, but who that person was has long since evaporated from my mind. I
can’t even recall where the party was held – uptown, downtown, in an
apartment or loft – nor my reason for accepting the invitation in the first
place."
Such cloudiness drifts into many of the scenes Adam recalls, and into the act
of writing, too, finally turning his prose into what Jim calls “encrypted,
Morse-code jottings”. Adam’s memoir never comes across quite like that on
the page; Auster deftly creates an illusion of aphasia in a way that never
makes us feels unpleasantly confused. But more often than not, when the fogs
of language and memory clear, what emerges are stereotypes. And when they
open their mouths, more question marks pour out.
Margot is presented as a type, a sensitive Parisian seductress dressed in a
black turtleneck sweater and black boots, who sits on a radiator at the
party, “without stirring a muscle, staring into space as if her central
mission in life is to look bored”. She wants to be a painter but takes few
real risks. She seems less a figure of the Rive Gauche than a bohemian
caricature from a comedy sketch, though less entertaining. Adam finds her
“deeply attractive”, but more as a “simulacrum of beauty, as if the style
and sophistication of her appearance embodied some feminine ideal of the
age”. Our suspicions that Auster is playing with his readers mirrors Adam’s
own mistrust of initial observations. He feels sexually attracted to Margot,
but he is not sure what to think of her, nor are we of her, him, or just
about anything in the novel. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it
requires forbearance.
While Margot comes across as dreary, Born is more fun. He is also a type, but
a colourful one, a classic Continental villain with shades of Iago, Svengali
and Dr No, with murky connections to secret military intelligence,
espionage, or “dirty work of some kind or another”. He is a political
scientist who hides a switchblade in his breast pocket: the perfect
scoundrel for the late 1960s.
Wealthy, cultured and hysterically condescending, Born takes an interest in
earnest Adam’s well-being, or so he says; yet he regards him with a cold eye
and an even chillier heart. When he learns Adam’s name, he says to Margot,
in front of his subject: “A good, solid, American name. So strong, so bland,
so dependable”. It is the name, Born says, of a gunslinger in a cowboy film,
or of a kindhearted surgeon in a soap opera “tragically in love with two
women at the same time” (a prophetic remark). But “nothing in America is
solid”, Adam somberly responds, adumbrating a bit too loudly, another
signature Auster theme. When Adam, who is Jewish, explains that the family
surname was actually simplified from “Walshinksky” at Ellis Island, Born
exclaims, with characteristic merriment: “What a country . . . Illiterate
officials robbing a man of his identity with a simple stroke of the pen”.
Writing words is everything. Here Auster’s debt to the ideas of Jacques
Lacan, especially to the notion of language as beyond the control of the
self, seems almost too limpid. It is Born’s wit that feels more sly and
natural.
If Born first strikes Adam as a “brittle, mocking jester” and not someone to
be taken seriously, that impression, like many in Invisible, does not last
long. Born offers a surprised Adam, an undergraduate with no publishing or
management experience, financial backing to start a literary magazine. It
sounds too good to be true to Adam, but he puts together the prospectus Born
says he requires, if only as a formality. During a strained dinner meant to
celebrate the new venture, Born asks Adam – in front of Margot – if he would
like to hold her “naked body”in his arms. When pressed, Adam, who doesn’t
want to lose the magazine job by offending Born, finally admits, yes, he
would. It’s a set-up. When Born goes on a trip to France, Adam and Margot
sleep together.
The sex – and there is lots of it in Invisible – is gleefully detailed. At
times Auster might as well have staged his sex scenes on Dr Lacan’s couch,
where it might better comport with “the pleasure of taking part in a
wordless animal dialogue that was conducted in a language of looking and
touching, of biting, tasting and stroking”. These examples of not so subtly
imposed concepts on characters’ bodies grow tiresome.
On his return to America, Born quickly learns that he has been betrayed and
announces his engagement to another, older Frenchwoman; Margot leaves for
France. Born bears Adam no ill will, but thanks him “for showing me the
light of truth”, a desig-nation close to meaninglessness in this world. It
is shortly after this that an act of brutal violence by Born, involving that
switchblade, severs his and Adam’s not-quite-friendship and sets in motion
more scandalous if not more evil proceedings. The rest of the novel, which
skips between 1967 and 2007, follows Jim Freeman as he grapples with the
moral dilemmas raised by Adam’s memoir manuscript, as well as the shocking
events involving Adam’s beautiful sister, Gywn.
Invisible undoubtedly plays to rarefied readerly appetites, yet Auster’s
painless, if at times overwritten, prose style, and the conventionally
artistic, middle-class characters, go down easily. One could not spoil the
ending because there isn’t one. Differentiation and development of character
are of less interest to the author than the idea of authorship and thematic
forces. Original imagery and a fresh, world-discovering sense of exposition
are pushed aside by self-conscious riffs on literary typecasting. When the
characters within a clever “fiction within a fiction” in Paris pull out a
Gauloise or wear a little hat “that resembles a beret”, as happens about
midway through the novel, one must suspect the author is either careless or
teasing his readers. There is a third possibility: the author may be trying
to tease but is not getting away with it. Since Auster used the detective
story genre to fashion one of the true achievements in postmodern fiction in
the mid-1980s in his brilliant New York Trilogy, he should be given some
benefit of the doubt.
All in all, Invisible is an intriguing but lugubrious work. More actual rather
than theorized farce, more of Born’s wit, and less Lacan might have leavened
things nicely. The novel astonishes when its author suddenly captures
characters’ pitiful loneliness in their struggles to commend their stories
to others. The tale’s pendulous swings across a forty-year gap do allow for
absorbing meditations on ageing and loss rarely encountered outside poetry.
When Invisible works best, we find ourselves feeling empathy for souls from
whom we have frankly come to expect less, and Auster artfully whittles
question marks into deadly little daggers of insight.
Paul Auster
INVISIBLE
304pp. Faber. £16.99.
978 0 571 24931 2
Bill Broun is Assistant Professor of English at East Stroudsburg
University of Pennsylvania. He recently finished writing a novel about
London Zoo.
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