I suspect anyone who was ever spellbound by the existential gumshoe shenanigans of The New York Trilogy – postmodernism in a fedora – will always take a chance on a new Paul Auster novel, however much he has tested that faith with the fiction he has produced in the decades since. He’s been struggling to get his gifts to align for some time – at least since 2007’s dourly Kafka-ish Travels in the Scriptorium – and while the Booker-shortlisted 4321 had admirers, its life-after-life premise (four takes on a single Auster-adjacent protagonist) felt to me void of spark.
So I wanted to love Baumgartner – all the more after the news this year that Auster was being treated for cancer – and for some 40 glorious pages I did. Starting in 2018, the book gives us two years in the life of the titular protagonist, a septuagenarian writer (what else?), almost a decade widowed when we join him at his desk at home in New Jersey. He needs to fetch a book from another room, but suddenly remembers the hob is still on from breakfast – and hadn’t he promised to call his sister? But there’s a UPS delivery at the door… and then the phone rings: his cleaner’s young daughter in distress because papá just sawed off two fingers at work. Another call at the door: someone to read the meter. Baumgartner descends to the cellar to show the way when – wallop – he tumbles downstairs…
Winningly farcical and fast-moving, it’s a terrific opening, a cascading comedy of perpetually interrupted thought, built on a clausal onrush of period-shy sentences in the manner of German writer Heinrich von Kleist, praised by Auster as “one of the greatest prose writers of the early 19th century”. The syntax – always more, more, and still more – is poignant as well as manic when, easing off the gas, with Baumgartner’s knee on ice, the novel’s pile-up of incident gives way to a passage in which he is seen obsessively unfolding and refolding the clothes of his late wife, Anna, garment by garment by garment.
Yet even in the most involving moments there’s a red flag: Auster’s actual words, and the events they itemise, matter less than the fact of their accumulation – a storytelling strategy whose recklessness comes into view once we slide from Baumgartner’s here-and-now into his memories of college, university, marriage and career as a Princeton philosophy professor. As he sifts the unpublished papers of Anna, a poet he first met in the 60s (excerpts include her memoir of an old lover named Frankie Boyle), there’s a dawning sense that the book won’t have the page count to resolve the vast number of threads it starts to spin. Texture, not substance, is the game, but when Baumgartner “asks himself where his mind will be taking him next”, you can hear the narrative architecture creak.
The oddest passage occurs when we find the protagonist “suddenly… remembering his trip to Ukraine two years ago and the day he spent in the town where [his mother’s] father was born”: a cue for Auster to plonk down an old piece about his own visit to an ancestral birthplace, transplanting his family tree to what Baumgartner calls “the obscure Auster side” of his heritage. The thriftiness is fine, ditto the long-patented authorial step from behind the curtain, but it’s hard not to see the episode as a bit of bodged-in bulk (Auster even introduces the segment as a “short, confounding text”, as if by way of apology).
When we hear that Anna’s death preceded “a glum interlude of masturbation [before he] started chasing after women” – the most important of them a divorcee 16 years his junior – the stage seems set for a probing of later-life lust, not least during a passage comparing their physical attributes. But even with the climactic arrival into Baumgartner’s life of a young female academic, familiar formulas are ignored in favour of a kind of amiable aimlessness. There’s a measure of charm in the news that a minor character is ready to come “back into the story after an absence of several chapters”, or the nudge-wink gloss on Baumgartner’s otherwise hazy opus-in-progress as a “serio-comic, quasi-fictional discourse on the self”, although the book is only knocking holes in a fourth wall it never cared to build. Auster’s turbo-charged kickstart ultimately takes us on a ride without destination – yet who would blame him?
Baumgartner by Paul Auster is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
