Man in the Dark

Auster, a man of diverse creative achievements, defies convenient labels with regard to genre and the divisions between literary fiction and the mainstream popular marketplace. Given his experiences with such multimedia endeavors as National Public Radio's Story Project, it's not surprising that Auster has a flair for dramatic narration when performing his own work. As he gives voice to ailing retired book critic August Brill, Auster milks the story-within-a-story structure to full effect. Impatient listeners may wonder exactly where this disparate tale of revisionist history, war, marital disappointments and grief might be headed. But with the nuanced—yet palpable—use of inflection, Auster compels his audience to await the twists and turns. As an invalid with an active imagination and time on his hands, Brill makes his frailties tangible and emotionally compelling without descending into full-blown pathos. A Henry Holt hardcover (Reviews, May 26). (Aug.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

A car accident and the death of his wife have left the retired book critic August Brill a physical and spiritual invalid. Virtually confined to his house with his recently divorced daughter and a twenty-three-year-old grandchild stricken with grief after the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Brill, an insomniac, attempts to stave off thoughts of death by telling himself bedtime stories. His tired mind weaves a tale that combines details of his life with more fantastic flights�such as the story of a man who, waking up in an alternate universe where 9/11 never happened and the 2000 election led to civil war, is sent on a mission to destroy the very person who has imagined him into existence. The narrative juxtapositions and the riddling starkness of Auster�s prose create an absorbing if mildly scattershot effect, breathing life into a meditation on the difference between the stories we want to tell and the stories we end up telling.

Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1400064759 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: In her third novel, Sittenfeld offers a thinly veiled account (Wisconsin, not Texas) of the life of Laura Bush, in the story of Alice Lindgren, who marries Charlie Blackwell, the ne�er-do-well son of a political dynasty who becomes President. The early chapters, in which Sittenfeld depicts an innocent childhood and adolescence disrupted by tragedy, are the most compelling. As the book progresses to more recent and familiar events, she has difficulty enlivening the ins and outs of electioneering and policymaking. The object of Sittenfeld�s fascination is the seeming incongruity between Alice�s liberal sympathies and her bookish intellect and Charlie�s conservative nature and general insouciance. Neither character is very likable�Alice weak-willed and martyrlike, Charlie unbearably self-centered�but the novel, Sittenfeld�s most fully realized yet, artfully evokes the painful reverberations of the past.

Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END ASIN:1596915609 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: This engrossing portrait of Virginia Woolf and the women who looked after her explores how modern ideas of class and gender crucial to Woolf�s writing ran up against her lingering ties to a waning Victorian domestic order. Woolf frequently pondered the �servant question,� but her concern for those she employed was tinged with distaste. �I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,� she wrote of Nellie Boxall, her cook for eighteen years. Though Woolf professed a desire for a time when masters and servants might be �fellow beings,� and argued in her work for space and autonomy for women, her life was one of dependence; she did not learn to cook until she was forty-seven. Light deftly �restores the servants to the story,� arguing that Woolf�s relationships with them were �as enduring, intimate and intense as any in her life.�

Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New YorkerEND ASIN:0465011225 ATTRIBUTE_NAME: 6800 SOURCE: From The New Yorker REVIEW: Seierstad, the author of �The Bookseller of Kabul,� first visited Chechnya in 1995, shortly after Russian tanks rolled in. Twelve years later, as another war gave way to a dubious, corrupt peace, she returned, at one point hiding her blond hair and dying her eyebrows and lashes to sneak across the border. This is a chronicle of reciprocal destruction: Seierstad talks to Chechen rebels and to victims of Russian torture; to the mother of a terrorist and the mother of a maimed Russian soldier; to a family that lost four sons to the war and to street children who prove too damaged even for the �angel� of the title, who runs a home for war orphans. At times, Seierstad�s persona is intrusive; when the Chechen President praises her looks, she tells us. But she is a humane witness to a dehumanizing conflict, and recent developments in the Caucasus make her testament all the more timely.

Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker END

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine

One doesn't want to say it, and yet it must be said: Here we go again. Another elegantly slim volume, the perfect size for palming single-handedly while riding the Metro or sipping a double espresso. Another wild fictive device that demolishes the walls separating author, character and reader, leading to that familiar through-the-looking-glass feeling -- the one that blew you away when you first discovered The New York Trilogy, continued to impress you all the way up through Oracle Night, and maybe didn't even begin to wear thin for you until Travels in the Scriptorium. Another story that, in the end, turns out to be about storytelling.

Another Paul Auster novel, that is. The Brooklyn-dwelling, 61-year-old writer still has his fierce champions; but, lately, championing Auster has come to feel more like defending him. Even in the most flattering reviews, critics have begun to express fatigue at the way he continues to rely on the same hall-of-mirrors approach to narrative design in novel after novel after novel. The man is a magician, indisputably, and his magic is still capable of dazzling. But over the course of 23 years, a lot of his readers have figured out the secret to his signature trick, and it's gotten to the point where some of those Austerian tropes have lost their otherworldly luster.

The trick works best when it's in service to a feeling rather than an idea, which is to say when Auster treats his characters like human beings rather than symbols. In Man in the Dark, his latest, the author has struck the right balance: Here is a novel that opens with chilly existentialism -- "I am alone in the dark" -- and winds its way through a surreal Borgesian labyrinth before ending tenderly, and humanely, with a grandfather and granddaughter keeping each other company during a long, sleepless night. As was the case in The Brooklyn Follies (2006), which, like this novel, featured a man in his twilight years recollecting a life that could have gone a little better, Auster is attempting real portraiture, not merely the Escher-print trippiness that has earned him a spot on every freshman English major's dorm-room bookshelf since the late 1980s.

Man in the Dark still manages to be pretty trippy, though. August Brill, a retired book critic who has moved in with his divorced daughter and adult granddaughter, deals with his chronic insomnia one night by making up a story about an ordinary man thrust into a parallel reality, one in which America is embroiled in a civil war brought about by the disputed presidential election of 2000. Brill names his character Owen Brick, and he begins Owen's story by having him wake up in a deep pit wearing a soldier's uniform. After being rescued by another soldier, the befuddled Brick learns that he has an important mission: He is to travel to Vermont and assassinate a man named August Brill, who has recklessly invented this crumbling, war-torn alternative America using nothing but his insomniac's imagination. "There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of a mind." So Brick is informed before being sent off to kill his creator, our narrator.

Auster, of course, is as much at home in these roiling metafictional waters as Michael Phelps is in a swimming pool. And it's certainly fun to play along, wondering -- with Brick and his author(s) -- how things in this weird multiverse will play out, as Brick edges ever closer to his target. Or is the target moving toward Brick?

Then Auster does something he might not have done in his younger days, back when he stayed up obsessing over story structure rather than musing on those topics that keep older men awake all night. Three-fourths of the way through Man in the Dark, the magician cuts short the act, calls up the house lights and explains the whole trick. Brill is visited in the dark by his grieving granddaughter, who owes her crippling heartbreak to a war that readers will recognize, sourly, as belonging to the real world. The code of Owen Brick is slowly cracked, as we begin to see how the figures, events and emotions in August Brill's life have been converted into the vocabulary of his waking dream.

"Stick to the story," Brill tells himself at the beginning of his sleepless night. "That's the only solution. Stick to the story, and then see what happens if I make it to the end." It wouldn't be an Auster novel without such moments of cheeky narrative reflexivity. But all the paradoxes, coincidences and origami-like plots -- the elements of this author's unique style -- really do add up to something more than trickery. Shortly before dawn, his insomniac concludes: "The real and the imagined are one." Maybe every story, Auster seems to suggest, turns out to be about storytelling, and maybe every storyteller is telling his or her own.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reactions to Paul Auster’s new novel may very well have come from alternate universes themselves. In one world, Auster is a great American man of letters writing a postmodern response to the events of our time, particularly 9/11, as only he can. In another world, his novel is yet another failed attempt at fictional engagement with the past eight years. There is a universe where Auster has matured from a young writer with a genius for multilayered, self-referential plots to a more sensitive observer of human suffering and the stories we tell to save ourselves. Yet others see a world where Auster is playing exactly the same games he has for years, only with less-developed characters and a half-hearted attempt at social commentary. It may be that readers, like Auster’s characters, will have to invent their own stories in order to make any sense out of Man in the Dark.

Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

"Probably Auster’s best novel."—Kirkus, starred review

"Astute and mesmerizing."—Booklist, starred review

"This best-selling author with a cult following of literati finally offers one to please both fan bases."—Library Journal, starred review

"This is perhaps Auster’s best book. But maybe that’s an unfair description. Man In The Dark is so unlike anything Auster has ever written that it doesn’t make sense to compare it with his earlier work. Sure, you can recognize the author of ‘Oracle Night’ and ‘Brooklyn Follies.’ But it’s as if that gentle mind has been joined by the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, the adamant pacifist, author of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ and creator of Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner of war who became ‘unstuck in time.’ Here we have multiple worlds and three generations, also unstuck in time. But like Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel, Auster’s book leaves one with a depth of feeling much larger than might be expected from such a small and concise work of art."—Stephen Elliott, San Francisco Chronicle

"In one thread, an ailing 72-year-old named Brill convalesces in Vermont; in the parallel and more eventful thread, a man named Brick wakes up in a dangerous dream—America currently in the middle of a 21st-century civil war. Both plots are propulsive. . . . [Auster is] a master of voice, an avuncular confidence man who can spin dark stories out of air."—Entertainment Weekly

"[Auster’s] magic has never flourished more fully than it does in Man In The Dark. . . . The novel delivers intense reading pleasure from start to finish."—Chauncey Mabe, Orlando Sentinel

"Vivid and arresting. . . . a novel that manages, admirably, to be both apocalyptic and tender. . . . The universe conceived by Auster is a world worth entering. And all that Brill struggles to forget in the pages of Man In The Dark translates into a book that deserves to be well remembered."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Auster is after something entirely different, in this haunting and beautifully crafted work, than speculative fiction. . . . This superb small novel isn’t, despite initial impressions, about war or politics at all. It is about, in the face of guilt and horror, choosing whether to die and how, if that is the choice, to live. It is, at heart, about the stratagems that we, but in particular our best novelists, devise as a means of keeping us going in the face of the ‘pitiless dark’ that will swallow us all."—Popmatters.com

"Man In The Dark . . . crashes onto shore with a great burst. It suddenly adds up, and what it adds up to can leave you sleepless."—The Buffalo News

"[A] fascinating new novel. . . . As Auster reminds us, often the worst wars are those fought in one’s own mind."—MSNBC.com

"Paul Auster’s twisty Man In The Dark concerns an alternate universe where two planes never toppled the World Trade Center. But Bush is still president, and a civil war rages in America. . . . Takes us closer to understanding the emotional wreckage [of 9/11]."—GQ

"The real magician here is Auster. Our new century so far has been as bleak and troubled as Brill’s last years. This little dream of a novel invests it with something newly precious. Hope riffles the pages of this beautiful, heartbreaking book."—Paste

"No writer is working harder than Auster to give America an existential literature to call its own, and Brill has a ruminative and slightly despairing mood that recalls Camus’ antiheros. Yet Man In The Dark isn’t a headlong leap into emptiness . . . Auster treats the theme of isolation straightforwardly, studying the emotional costs of war through Brill’s own vivid memories and his family’s own recent heartbreak. In the process, he arrives at the provocative notion that war stories and love stories aren’t as different as we might like to think."—Washington City Paper