YOUNG, NUMB & FULL OF GLUM
Auster pads his latest memoir with reheated love letters. By Carlos Amato
Report from the Interior ★★ ★★★
Paul Auster (Faber & Faber, R250)
PAUL Auster is a born storyteller, and that may be his biggest problem. He never stops writing — he’s on 29 books and counting this year — and he doesn’t stop when his prose veers into clunky contrivance or boilerplate dialogue, as it frequently does.
Back in the 1980s, Auster cranked out standard-grade postmodernist fiction: in the last decade, he has reverted to rollicking, paperthin realism. He is the poor man’s Don DeLillo. As a result, he’s richer than DeLillo, because we actually read his novels, instead of merely savouring the reviews. Because Auster’s fiction is good fun. To put it in culinary terms, he produces literary Nik-Naks: tasty, digestible and nutritionally worthless.
This kind of creative success is fascinating, so I was hoping this memoir would illuminate some secrets from inside the machine. Auster made his name with a memoir, his first book, The Invention of Solitude, published in 1982, an acclaimed rumination on the death of his emotionally remote father.
Report from the Interior is his second autobiographical detour in quick succession, following last year’s Winter Journal, a letter of reminiscences addressed to his own body. This is supposed to be a companion piece: an examination of his larval and pupal mind.
It starts well enough, with a sensitive, lyrical account of his early childhood in New Jersey, the son of a striving, miserable Jewish couple. Auster gives us a handle on both the repression and the nascent liberty of a ’50s suburban childhood: a world flooded with baseball, sunshine, anti-Semitism and rock’n’roll, and punctuated with escapes into Robert Louis Stevenson.
But the narrative becalms with two long, scene-by-scene accounts of The Shrinking Man and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang— two formative films that wowed the young Auster, but not me. The last third of the memoir is the worst: a wearisome batch of Auster’s letters to his girlfriend, Lydia Davis, whom he later married. Written from Paris and New York, they paint a portrait of the artist as a young moron.
This is Auster the student at his most insufferable: “I hate myself for what I feel to be an impatience with others, and yet I can do nothing about it. And at the same time I yearn to love and be loved, knowing that it is impos- sible. I think, in some profound way, that I have fled from the real . . . At the same time I am convinced that to live is more important than art.”
Upon reading a passage like this, I sense, in some profound way, that I would like to kick the 20-year-old Auster’s arse. The 67-year-old writer quotes his youthful anguish and pretension without much amusement — fair enough, because the letters are not especially funny. They amount to padding and self-plagiarism: Auster has effectively outsourced the last third of this ill-conceived book to his annoying younger self.
Not that there’s any-
Squaring the lightweight Auster against Coetzee is like comparing apples with bears
thing wrong with offering us an unflinching appraisal of callow vanities. In Youth , for example, JM Coetzee looks back on a figure even less likeable than the young Auster — but crucially, he doesn’t just copy and paste the poor fool’s incompetent missives.
Coetzee goes to the effort of occupying that flailing post-adolescent consciousness, and writing properly from within it. The reward for real labour of memory is real authenticity and pathos.
Of course it’s unfair to square the lightweight Auster against Coetzee: that would be comparing apples with bears. But it’s just as unfair — on reader and writer alike — to bash out a half-arsed literary memoir. It’s one thing to sell your characters short, but it’s another thing entirely to do that to yourself.