Paul Auster, _Man in the Dark_

PAUL AUSTER'S LIFETIME batting average has been slipping, perhaps.  On my scorecard, Travels in the Scriptorium was a clean single, Oracle Night a double up the alley, but Brooklyn Follies was a flyball to the warning track and Timbuktu a pop-up with a high lovely arc that never got past the infield.  The last time he knocked it over the fence, by my reckoning, is The Book of Illusions.  I'm not sure how to score Man in the Dark.

We have an aging literary critic, August Brill, partly disabled by an auto accident, living with his divorced daughter and grieving grand-daughter (her ex-boyfriend, we eventually learn, was killed in Iraq).  When unable to sleep, he invents a story, and the first two-thirds of the novel is in large part given over to one of these inventions: Owen Brick comes to consciousness to find himself in a USA that erupted in civil war after the 2000 election, and he has been assigned the task of assassinating the person responsible for the war -- which turns out to be the person who invented the story, August Brill.

I found myself captivated by this part.  A bit of counterfactual history à la Roth and Chabon, a bit of metafictional vengeance of characters on their creator à la Flann O'Brien, a bit of assassination-as-solution à la Nicholson Baker, a bit of many- worlds theory à la Philip Pullman and who knows how many sci fi writers... but Brill grows weary, apparently, of his invention, and about two-thirds of the way through the novel the story abruptly terminates with Brick shot in the head.  And that's that.

At about this point Brill is joined by his granddaughter, likewise unable to sleep, and he tells the story of how he met, married, lost, and regained his wife, the young woman's grandmother.  We also learn here of how the granddaughter's ex-boyfriend, after their breakup, got a job with a contractor in Iraq as a  truckdriver, was taken hostage, and murdered, as abruptly and as brutally as Owen Brick.

No particular consolation emerges at the end, apart from the announcement that "the weird world rolls on"" -- a line from a poem by Nathaniel Hawthorne's daughter, whose biography Brill's daughter is writing.

Auster puts me in mind of Roth, in that I read every novel more or less as it appears, even though at this point I can foresee much of what I am about to experience.  In Roth, a protagonist whose age, background, and circumstances have discernible affinities with Roth's own, plus Newark, sex, writing, the decline and fall of the American republic, and (recently) death.  In Auster, a protagonist whose age, background, and circumstances have discernible affinities with Auster's own, plus New York City, obsession, nested narratives, life in the wake of catastrophic losses, and (recently) aging.  

In both cases, however, knowing what I am likely in for does nothing to diminish my enjoyment as I read.  I just like the way they do what they do so much that that dejà-vu factor doesn't matter.  I'll be reading Auster until I die, or he does.

I still don't know whether to score this one a hit or an out.  I don't see myself urging it on anyone, so it's probably not a hit -- but somehow, there he is on base, the sly veteran, taking a lead bigger than he has any business taking...