Book Review: Invisible by Paul Auster

If Shakespeare forever remains the master of the play within a play, Paul Auster has staked his claim to the book within the book. His characters often write books, or plan to do so. They anguish over manuscripts, obsess about texts, find their personal destinies via real or imagined narratives. Even more to the point, their very existence is frequently presented as situated within books or possible books — and I’m not talking about the one you hold in your hand while reading Mr. Auster. As these meta-narratives battle for supremacy, readers are left to puzzle over their own changing relationship to texts that may eventually prove to be mere texts within texts. Welcome to the world of fiction as a house of mirrors!

In an era in which reality and truth are perceived by many as problematic, Auster has emerged as a seminal author. Every shift in his fictions is contextualized. The “truth” of chapter one may turn out to be an imaginative exercise after chapter two. Storytelling of this sort is a type of multitasking, impressive when it works, but forever running the risk of coming across as cold and almost inhuman.One reads Auster for many reasons, but usually for the light rather than the warmth.

Yet his latest novel Invisible evokes a more emotionally charged atmosphere than one usually finds with Auster—and without sacrificing the multilayered narrative structure that is his trademark. Human relationships are as important as textual relationships here. Love, passion, murder, revenge, renunciation, obsession: all these ingredients, ones we associate more with classical drama than the post-modern novel, figure prominently in Invisible.Yes, plot, that most mistreated and under-appreciated ingredient in serious fiction, is given the red carpet treatment.

The first chapter of Invisible ostensibly relates the activities of one Adam Walker, a student at Columbia University and aspiring poet, during the Spring of 1967. Walker meets a bristly yet intriguing visiting professor named Rudolf Born at a party, an encounter that sets of a strange chain of events. Born offers to provide Walker with ample funds to start a literary magazine, a proposition that the young man finds as alluring as it is unexpected.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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