A Bleak House

Paul Auster’s Man is Not the Only One in the Dark

By John Hood

First things first: If you’re looking for reasons to be cheerful, you don’t wanna look here, unless, that is, you’re the kinda blockhead who finds cheer in other people’s misfortune. I mean, the man’s “wife died last year. The daughter’s husband left her five years ago. [And] the granddaughter’s boyfriend was killed.” If you find something happy about that, then the therapy clearly isn’t working.

Then again, even “a house of grieving, wounded souls” can have qualities that redeem it beyond the psychotic, as well as the bleak, especially when it’s been built by the kinda master craftsman who could probably create a comfortable home out of the ether — even as it slips away.

Naturally, I’m talking about the ever-masterful Paul Auster, a writer whose constructs have taken the unhinged and hung ’em high, up where the air is at once rarefied and heady, not so much with nostalgia, mind you (though there decidedly is that), but with knowing. The sorta know that springs from the stories of our lives, lived down and fully told, no matter what the cost. 

Auster’s latest, Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $23), is blessedly no different. Folks look inward, folks look back, and folks look askew at their own reflection — then they set out to tell about it, in ever-shifting lucidity. In this case, though, it’s the parallel beginnings that hold all the hope, perhaps because the end is so very near, and dear.

Near and dear to one August Brill, anyway, is a 72-year-old former book critic who lies in bed at night telling himself stories that “prevent him from thinking about things [he’d] prefer to forget.” Brill’s not only near the end of his life — he’s just about at the end of his tether, and nothing but a tenuous grasp at straw stories can prevent him from pulling his own final curtain.

Actually, it’s “the story of a man who must kill the man who created him” that keeps him from shutting his own mouth for good.

This part of the tale takes place during the Second American Civil War, which itself takes place in a universe parallel to the one Brill’s imagining. At the core is one Owen Brick, an also-ran who wakes one day to find himself burdened with the task of assassinating the man who’s imagining the war, and, in effect, imagining Owen Brick. If that sounds a little convoluted, think of it like this: Brill created Brick to kill Brill because Brick is killing people.

Confused yet? You won’t be once you get into the book. Remember, this is Auster, a man who can compound multiplicity and still keep it level-headed — even as he blows it out of all proportion.

Which is kinda what Brill’s descendants have done with their deeply pocketed misery: daughter Miriam, who’s still moping about the loss of her husband half a decade later, and granddaughter Katya, who continues to blame herself for the brutal death of her ex. Both sad lasses cling to loss as if it were a lifeline, and, in the process, just keep on drowning in a sea of utter sorrow.

But there’s some cold truth to be had, even in the warmth of despair, and, like it or not, everybody gets a chance to face it: the gals, be it through the safety of objects or the life of a saint, and Brill, who comes to discover that even the most robust storyteller can’t talk his way out of his own life. Whether or not any of ’em end up facing the light is really a matter of perception, but you can be assured that each of ’em began in a very deep dark.