When Sy Baumgartner’s wife Anna, née Blume, dies, a decade before this whimsical, clever and at times frustrating novel opens, part of him dies too – though it takes him a quarter of the book to realise it.
The two were married for nearly 40 years. Now Sy is 71 and about to retire from Princeton, where he teaches philosophy. We first meet him one morning while he is busy writing a monograph on Kierkegaard. Before the day ends he is interrupted by a series of freak accidents: he burns his hand on a pan he’s left on the stove, takes a call from his cleaning lady’s daughter, who reports that her father has just severed two of his fingers with a buzz saw, and finally falls down the cellar stairs, damaging his knee. You are reminded of Saul Bellow’s observation in Henderson the Rain King that “truth comes in blows”: felled, Sy recalls that the pan was the very one he was buying when, at 20, he first saw Anna in a hardware store and experienced a coup de foudre. It’s a step on the road to a delayed self-confrontation.
Two months later, knee healed, Sy is at work on a new book about the “intractable mind-body conundrum called phantom limb syndrome”. Perhaps this is the trope he has been searching for that will lift the inertia he’s felt since Anna’s death? Ten years ago, too, he “managed to start walking again”, but emotionally he is still limping along, unable to move on. Anna was a gifted translator and poet – we are treated to a witty poem by her called Lexicon, where she appears in his buttonhole as a red flower, “gleaming like a lit match in the dark”. Of course “Blume” is the German for flower, and Sy decides to embrace what he regards as the poem’s implicit erotic message by proposing to the woman he’s been seeing for the last few years, a fellow academic called Judith Feuer (“fire”). But his new flame turns him down: the match fizzles out, and he’s left in the dark again.
Auster’s slyly self-referential fiction is full of subtle linguistic games, and this, his 20th novel, is no exception, offering a rueful warning about the costs of constructing a sense of self through words. Sy characterises the writer’s occupation as a “life sentence”, quite literally: “Great effort is required to make a sentence … and as one sentence must inevitably follow another in order to build a work composed of sentences … the days pass quickly”. When Sy has at last finished Mysteries of the Wheel, his latest exposition of his ideas “about embodied consciousness and the doubleness of being”, this time expressed as a tongue-in-cheek meditation on “the car as person, the person as car”, he befriends a graduate student who wants to write about Anna’s poetry. What’s more, she is planning to drive all the way from Michigan to meet him. Will theirs be the relationship that takes him where he needs to go? Or should he be wary of getting behind the wheel again?
I’ve said that Baumgartner is frustrating. Mostly the effect is deliberate: ageing and losing control of your physical being, especially if you are a mind-body identity theorist like Sy, is no easy ride. The novel sets up seductive links between bodily experience and how we create the narrative of our lives. Sy’s near-farcical accidents and frustrations, and his resulting feints at meaning, are adroitly handled. But sometimes you wonder how accurate his memory really is.
In what should be a crucial moment, Sy spots an item in the New York Review of Books that amuses him and, forgetting that his wife is dead, calls out to Anna to share it with her. “The book under review was something called Waters of the World, and the author’s name was Sarah Dry. Waters of the World – by Sarah Dry! … Anna, get a load of this, he said, as he started walking toward the living room. You’ll wet your pants with laughter.” This is funny? So much of Baumgartner depends on our belief in the connection between Sy and Anna. You keep hoping for glimpses of what such a marriage of true minds might look like, “a correspondence between intellectual and spiritual comrades”, as he insists, but all you get are coy references to their “bone-shaking nights in bed” and lame jokes. It’s a dull Kierkegaardian reality check.
A woman called Anna Blume has appeared in Auster’s work before, as the narrator of the post-apocalyptic novel In the Country of Last Things (1987). There she was a citizen of the future; here she belongs firmly to what her widower calls “the lost world of Then”. Auster hints that Anna is an anima of sorts, an ideal other self. But the materialist Sy Baumgartner is a lacklustre alter ego for his brilliant creator. They share Mitteleuropean ancestry, a love of wordplay, and a contemplative bent – and Sy’s mother’s maiden name is Auster, to boot. It’s a shame, then, that Sy is so often full of hot air.
• Baumgartner by Paul Auster is published by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
