The Music of Chance

 

Paul Auster writes about chance in most of his novels, from a chance phone call in ‘City of Glass’ (New York Trilogy) to writing four versions of the same life, with outcomes dictated by an incident or its absence in 4321. The Music of Chance has such elements: Nashe begins a year of driving across America on a whim, after missing a ramp on the freeway, Nashe heads in the opposite direction to where he had planned to go. Committed now to the wrong road, he understood ‘that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same’ (p. 5). Similarly, when Nashe picks up a beaten-up young hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, his life changes, ‘for better or worse’ in that moment (p. 19). For the record, decidedly for the worse.

The strange, the surreal, also characterise many Auster novels. In Mr Vertigo, Walt undergoes bizare and difficult trainings (such as being buried alive) before learning to levitate, earning a living a circus by making the impossible appear to be simply a trick. In The Music of Chance, an equally absurd idea drives the narrative logic: after losing a card game to a pair of rich men at their isolated house, Nashe and Pozzi become contractually obligated to build an enormous wall from a pile of stones brought over from a ruined fifteen-century castle from Cork, Ireland. What at first appears to be a joke (‘a Wailing Wall’, quips Nashe [p. 78]) becomes an idea that Nashe accepts as 'the only solution to his predicament’ (p. 100).

The narrative thus moves from one of freedom, with a man leaving behind his settled life after divorce for the open road, to entrapment – where a man must lift enormous stones for weeks on end to try to pay off a debt through incredible physical labour, living with his workmate behind a fence in a temporary dwelling, as summer turns to autumn and autumn turns to winter. In Mr Vertigo, the price paid for levitation is severe headache; here, the abandonment of life’s normal restraints and 9-to-5 labour is paid for by unreasonable imprisonment, and worse.

There were times when I read The Music of Chance where I longed for Nashe’s escape, or at least for him to challenge his fate with vigour. As the novel was published in 1990, it isn’t fair to draw lazy parallels to a man in a red hat with an obsession to build a wall – but something absurd in contemporary American life must have been foreseen in Auster’s terrible fables like this one. One-night, Nashe reads from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, randomly, coming across these words in the middle of a sentence: ‘… until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card …’ (p. 185). That’s the mood, I think, where meaning strikes me today: trusting chance for its music, only to realise that to have risked all on the turn of a card was a mistake. What is left is a gut-wrenching sense of guilt, and a gambler's remorse to have been so lazy with one’s own fate.