An author's cat-and-mouse games
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday December 18, 2009
InvisibleBy Paul AusterFaber & Faber, 308pp, $32.99Reviewed by Andrew RiemerThe reader is left guessing in an old-fashioned page-turner that raises questions about what is real. PAUL AUSTER is a very clever writer. He defies the ancient maxim that nothing can be made out of nothing. At heart, this ingenious novel is no more than a slender anecdote, and a fairly banal one at that.The year is 1967. Adam Walker, an aspiring poet, is in his second year of study at New York's Columbia University. He meets Rudolf Born, an enigmatic, thirty-something European scholar - French? Swiss? German? - and Margot, Born's French girlfriend. Adam is taken under Born's wing and into Margot's bed. One night he sees Born do something horrible. He dithers for a day or two, then contacts the police. Too late: Born is already in Paris.The next year, Adam himself is in Paris. He hopes to find Margot and avoid Born. As it often turns out, of course, he bumps into Born almost straight away. Born insists that Adam must meet the woman he is about to marry, Hlne, who is waiting to divorce her husband (he's been lying in a coma ever since he crashed his car) and her 18-year-old daughter Ccile.Ccile falls for Adam. Adam remains indifferent to Ccile, a short-sighted pianist, but he feels sorry enough for mother and daughter to reveal what he knows about Born. The next day the police burst into his room, claim to find a stash of drugs and deport him. End of story, more or less.Auster tells this commonplace tale in a most intricate way. The first part seems straightforward enough. Adam remembers the weeks in 1967 when he saw a great deal - more than he should have, he realises - of Born and Margot.At the beginning of the second part we learn that what we have just read was Adam's attempt, 40 years later, to fashion a fictional account of those weeks. He is dying of leukemia. He gets in touch with Jim, the famous novelist James Freeman, whom he knew at Columbia in 1965. He asks Jim to read his manuscript and to meet him in California, where he has been living for many years. Jim agrees, so Adam sends him a further instalment, written this time in the second person - "You are 20 years old and have just finished your second year of college ... " - about his relationship with his sister Gwyn.Jim arrives at Adam's house only to learn from his step-daughter that Adam died while Jim was in the air. She had obeyed his instructions and wiped the hard disc on his computer. But Jim finds a printout waiting for him when he gets home. It is a series of telegraphic notes, written in the third person, giving the bare bones of the end of Adam's adventures in Paris.In Paris, Jim tracks down the ageing Ccile. Her mother never married Born, she tells the celebrated author, but she had visited him in the Caribbean. She gives Jim the diary she kept at the time, which reveals the truth about Born.The odd thing is that I found myself enjoying this farrago, even though some of Auster's tactics are irritating. Born, for instance, bears the name of a Provencal troubadour commemorated in Dante's Inferno, but that was not his real name, Jim informs us. Indeed, he goes on to say, every name (including his own) and every place, except Paris, has been changed. So we have to conclude, I suppose, that the real story, the real people and the real places remain invisible.There is something decidedly old-fashioned about this kind of cat-and-mouse game. Georges Perec - who gets a fleeting mention - raised it to elaborate heights in the 1960s and '70s. Appropriately, therefore, Adam's novel was to be called 1967 - except that (as we know) Jim changed everything.Invisible is an eminently readable essay in literary pastiche. Whether it has anything urgent to say is an entirely different matter.Andrew Riemer is the Herald's chief book reviewer.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald