Baumgartner

 

After the epic nature of 4321 (900 + pages) Baumgartner is a light work, yet still with Auster’s characteristic depth of thought and playfulness with fictional form. 

We open with a writer at his desk, ‘pen in hand … midway through a sentence in the third chapter of his monograph on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms’ (p. 1). A New Yor intellectual, in other words – but one distracted by something burning on the stove downstairs; the call of UPS (Baumgartner orders books to have a moment of Molly’s company); and a young visitor whose father has severed off some fingers and so Rosita has come instead of her mother, his cleaner (how Auster). As the reviewers in The Guardian and The New York Times note, the novel begins at pace. Soon Baumgartner has fallen down a staircase in his basement, and has been rescued by a young man on his first day in the Public Service Electric & Gas Company.

Chapter 2 introduces a metaphorical idea about phantom limbs and how this might help Baumgartner to understand his decade-long grief for his wife’s tragic death (‘He is a human stump now, a half man who has lost the half of himself that had made him whole …’ [p. 28]’). In exploring this grief, Baumgartner comes across a passage of his wife’s writing about her own loss – that of her first love, Frankie Boyle. Frankie, athlete, and soulmate, comes to life in a thirteen-page interlude from the main narrative. This leads Baumgartner to recall his first stages of grief, which included him typing ‘gibberish’ on Anna’s typewriter because he missed her old sounds, and later, his exploration and publication of her poetry. Another extract from Anna’s diary (ten pages) interrupts the narrative again in Chapter 3 and then we have the story of their early love and marriage, before we jump forward to his current love, Judith, the product of a ‘well-heeled Jewish family from the New York suburbs’ (p. 91). Other interludes (criticized by the Guardian reviewer) include a passage ‘written’ by Baumgartner in which he describes a visit to Ukraine in September 2017 where he comes to understand something of the name Auster and the horror of war and the Holocaust.

So, as the novel progresses, Baumgartner is at work on ‘Mysteries of the Wheel’, while he prepares to host a young academic who has become interested in his deceased wife’s poetry and sets out on a fateful journey to meet her on January 3, 2020. Baumgartner drives a Subaru, normally a reliable car, but the expectation of plot described by Fiona Maazel (New York Times reviewer) finally catches up with our protagonist in the dying pages of the novel (so to speak).

What to make of all of this? I am a one-eyed Paul Auster fan, so while I don’t think it is his best work, I was happy to go along for the short ride (202 pages). It’s true that there are stories here that open and aren’t fully developed – and perhaps the novel might have opened further in another 202 pages. The art might be in reading the novel as the character’s memoir: clock ticking down, not as old as he might be in his mind, living in the past and yet finishing two books, even if the last one turns out to be (as he thinks) ‘bullshit on toast’ (p. 191). Auster’s novel isn’t that – and one imagines – neither is Baumgartner’s.

(This review was written before the sad news of Auster’s death on 30 April 2024. Here’s the New York Times article celebrating this wonderful writer, truly one of the greats).