Malaise mars writer’s golden years

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This article was published 25/11/2023 (1031 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

American writer Paul Auster’s previous, the Booker-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1, explored four parallel versions of a man’s life from childhood on. It’s an interesting idea — to get to know the same person in four different iterations and explore how much of who we are is ingrained and how much is contingent on the outside circumstances that shape our experiences and decisions.

In this concise and readable followup, Auster’s title character has only a single life to reflect on, and the page count is, appropriately enough, about one quarter of that of the preceding work. Long-time fans of the novelist can still make comparisons, weighing the fictional man’s 70-odd years against the author’s similar stretch of personal history. But it is unclear how valuable that may be; as a writer Auster is known for sharing autobiographical details with the characters he writes, but this does not necessarily mean he is writing about his own life.

What Auster is writing about here is a man, seemingly near the end of his span on Earth, who has already been marking time for almost a decade since his wife’s accidental death. The story covers only a couple of years within the present tense, and in that time Baumgartner, a philosophy professor and a writer, does comparatively little of great excitement. He spends his days poring over old love letters, attending to (or forgetting about) daily chores, ruminating on retirement and dozing in his lawn chair while reminiscing about his childhood and long-dead parents.

And for a while it seems like perhaps the contemporary Baumgartner is meant to serve merely as a framing device, a vehicle to introduce far richer past episodes that define this life that is, after all, essentially finished. But as subdued as these scenes are, the man is still going through something. Baumgartner is realizing two things simultaneously. First: he never fully made it through the process of grieving for his wife. Second: he has been functional but emotionally and spiritually shut down for a long time, but as long as his heart is still beating, there is still hope he can come back to life.

One can’t help but root for Baumgartner to find himself, find excitement for the future and have a long-delayed “third act.” But it’s by no means certain this will happen, and there is an increasing sense of foreboding as the story progresses. Despite the novel’s realistic, matter-of-fact style, a somewhat incongruous sense of dramatic irony begins to crown in around the narrative edges. This, along with the ambiguous and oddly framed ending, suggests a postmodernist sensibility that might seem more at home in the works of Milan Kundera rather than what the first two-thirds of Auster’s book seemed to be setting up.

Then again, it might still serve to make a good point. Real life is full of that same, very reasonable foreboding. Ultimately, we all get cut short, we all have just one more thing we wanted to do when time runs out. The tone of the story is true to life, if also a little discomfiting, in leaving the reader so uncertain to the last as to how or whether Baumgartner’s story will end by the final pages of the text.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.