Baumgartner by Paul Auster

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on November 7, 2023

It’s customary for authors to write a meditation on aging as they cope with their own journey into twilight. Paul Auster is 76 and thus of an age that encourages writers to contemplate their mortality. Yet his prose is still sharp, his insights as strong as ever. If, like Sy Baumgartner, Auster sometimes forgets to zip up his fly, he hasn’t forgotten how to write. Like Baumgartner, “he can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same.”

Baumgartner begins the novel as a philosophy professor on leave from Princeton. He lives a “day of endless mishaps,” beginning with a pan that scorched because he forgot to turn off a burner, a burned hand as he picks up the pan, and a tumble down the basement stairs as he tries to guide a new meter reader. The unfortunate events take his memory back to his first apartment at the age of twenty and his first purchase of cooking utensils, including the pan that is now ruined, and his first glimpse of Anna. They married five years later and his true life began, a life that ended with her death nine years ago.

Much of Baumgartner’s current life is spent coping with grief. Learning that someone’s fingers were severed in a work accident, Baumgartner begins to think of phantom limb syndrome as “a metaphor of human suffering and loss.” He views the loss of Anna as having severed his arms and legs from his torso, leaving him “a human stump, a half man who lost the half of himself that had made him whole.” He learned to put on a game front in the years following her loss, even learned to chase women, but the artificial appendages he has attached to his limbless torso feel nothing when he catches one. A year after his tumble down the stairs, he has learned to understand that “if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain.” He has been hiding from that pain — slowly replacing everything in his house that might remind him of Anna — but “to live in fear of pain is to refuse to live.”

Baumgartner has a dream — or he assumes it’s a dream — about answering a disconnected telephone and listening to Anna explain the dark void of the afterlife, a void she breaches only because he still thinks about her. The dream propels him into motion, reinvigorates dormant limbs, eventually allows him to open his heart to Judith, “something altogether different and new, and how could anyone who has lived as long as he has ask for anything more than that?” He later prepares to give access to Anna’s literary work to a college student who he sees as a surrogate daughter, a young woman who embodies Anna’s spirit and whose reverence for Anna’s work matches Baumgartner’s veneration of Anna’s life.

Baumgartner spends much of the novel’s second half recalling his family history (including a nostalgic examination of his mother’s life, a woman whose maiden name was Auster). He writes an essay about a trip to Ukraine, where his grandfather Auster lived before emigrating to America. He hears a haunting story about the city of his grandfather’s birth, a city that was taken over by wolves after all its residents had been killed or fled. He chooses to believe the story, for its symbolism if not for its absolute truth. Auster’s point (in this and other parts of the novel) seems to be that the stories we hold in our memory are the stories we need, even if they are not factually precise.

Apart from the novel’s exploration of its title character, Baumgartner is a celebration of good people, from the kind meter reader who helps Baumgartner when he falls down his basement stairs to a carpenter who learned Spanish to converse with Latin American teammates when he played minor league baseball and “has a gift for spreading life wherever he happens to go.” Most good people will not make it into history books, but they are no less important in the overall scheme of human existence. Despite the evil that wiped out the city of his grandfather’s birth, despite the darkness of political leaders that threatens to overshadow decency, Auster’s focus is on the positive, however tenuous positivity might be in a life that inevitably mixes joy with pain.

The novel ends on an ominous note of ironic ambiguity that nicely sums up Baumgarter’s approach to life. What happens next is for the reader to imagine. In the course of a single life, a life full of love and loss, what happens next is relatively unimportant. Baumgartner’s story is only one of billions. However it might end, its importance lies in the fact that Baumgartner existed, that he contributed, that he loved and was loved in return. As Baumgartner asks, how could anyone “ask for anything more than that?”

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In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster

First published in 1987 

I don't know whether In the Country of Last Things is post-apocalyptic in the strict sense of the word. It describes no apocalyptic event, and what people recall of the past is unreliable, the stuff of legend. The unnamed (presumably American) city that is the novel's focus is in a state of decay, seemingly the result of entropy rather than a single disaster-inducing cause. As the narrator describes it, "the city seems to be consuming itself." Most inhabitants are homeless, scrounging for food or scraps of formerly useful objects that can be resold. Many are simply waiting to die, often actively pursuing death (sometimes in bizarre ways), a desire that has given birth to creative and lucrative new businesses. Absurd religions flourish. Armed invaders seize buildings, evicting tenants; ownership of realty is a concept that belongs to a forgotten past. Religious groups -- all of them -- are oppressed. Scholarship is all but dead. The social compact is in ruins and the corrupt government is useless except as a disposer of dead bodies.

In the Country of Last Things is written as a letter from Anna Blume, a young woman who has traveled overseas to visit the city in search of her brother, a journalist who has not contacted his editor in nine months. Writing the letter, Anna feels she is "screaming into a vast and terrible blackness." Through all her hardships and struggles, her encounters with multiple sinners and occasional saints, Anna adapts and endures. Tragedy follows tragedy, interspersed with random acts of kindness. Ultimately, her life is reduced to a desire "to live one more day."

Paul Auster's novel explores (in Anna's words) "the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too." The novel is bleak but the darkness is occasionally illuminated by pockets of hope -- there are a few people who offer unselfish assistance, who tend to the suffering -- suggesting, perhaps, that even when there is nothing, when all the safety nets have dissolved, a willingness to help strangers at the expense of one's own health and safety remains a fundamental component of human nature, at least for some. The unanswered question is whether those people will triumph, or whether they will be overcome by those who hoard resources, who control a dysfunctional government, who care only about their own lives.

The novel's ending is inconclusive. We do not know what will become of Anna, but that's the nature of life. None of us know our fate. In the Country of Last Things tells us that we have the power to make choices, and that even small and seemingly inconsequential decisions make it possible to survive, at least in spirit, when it seems that there is nothing left. An optimistic reader will think it likely that Anna will never lose her humanity despite the obstacles that impede her continuing journey.

As always, Auster's prose is lucid, his characters are well-defined, his imagery is scintillating, and his story merits serious thought and discussion. This may not be Auster's best work -- it is certainly a departure from the kinds of novels he wrote before and after this one -- but it is a powerful and compelling story told by one of the nation's most accomplished writers.

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Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 19, 2008

August Brill, age 72, lives with his daughter and granddaughter. Brill is a temporary invalid, having crushed his leg in a car accident. Brill recently lost his wife; his daughter's husband left her; his granddaughter's boyfriend was recently murdered. Brill and his granddaughter spend their days watching Netflix movies (she's a film student); Brill spends his sleepless nights inventing stories. The story he invents during the course of the novel centers on a man who has been abducted from his life, transplanted to an alternative Earth where 9/11 never happened, where a civil war is claiming millions of lives. The civil war is happening because a writer (Brill) is writing about it; the abducted man is tasked with killing Brill.

As one would expect from a Paul Auster novel, Man in the Dark is elegantly written. Like most of Auster's characters, Brill is isolated, and not only (or primarily) because of his limited mobility is limited by a recent traffic accident. He has difficulty connecting with both his daughter and granddaughter; the reader suspects he had the same problem with his wife before her death. The main characters are all working their way through pain. The story Brill creates to combat his insomnia is telling: Brill seems to want to cast himself as the abducted man (relatively young, happily married) who is charged with killing the old, destructive man Brill imagines himself to have become. Ultimately he confides something of his life to his granddaughter, who is also unable to sleep, and by doing so perhaps starts coming to terms with the person he has become.

All of this is heavy stuff and yet, at the end, I was left with an "is that all there is?" feeling. I was hoping for a bit more substance to emerge from this thin novel. Still, I found it worth reading just for the enjoyment of Auster's prose: the writing is sharp and poignant. For that I can recommend it, but readers shouldn't expect the depth of Auster's best work.

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