An impossible love

INVISIBLE

By Paul Auster

308 pages

Available at National Book Store

Young Adam Walker, whose story occupies much of Paul Auster’s latest novel Invisible, finds himself presented with a tempting proposition in the opening pages: a strange benefactor, Frenchman Rudolf Born, meets the college student and would-be poet at a Manhattan party, and offers to bankroll a literary magazine with Walker as the editor. Born offers Walker a huge sum (huge for 1967) to put up the kind of artistic quarterly he’s always dreamed of.

But as with most things in Paul Auster’s novels, it’s an offer that’s too good to be true.

Told in the first person, the first section of Invisible charts Adam’s gradual disintegration — his fall from identity — as he learns too much about Born, along with the older man’s live-in French partner, Margot. Temptation may lie in the form of magazine funding, or in the sexual favors of Margot, 10 years older than Adam and aware of the dangers of crossing a man like Born — a political science professor who believes that “war is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.”

Adam soon finds himself engaged in war, locked in combat with an adversary who seems to live and breathe fabrication the way others live and breathe air.

At the heart of Invisible is a dark passion, something it’s better not to reveal here, but which drives Adam (note the name) into all sorts of dangerous territory. Is it a mystery? Is it a love story? It’s a little of both, but sorry, Valentine’s Day readers: lust is more like it.

As with much of Auster’s work, in this novel we are invited to pore over a text — in this case, a manuscript consisting of four sequential texts, sent to Walker’s friend, James — to decipher clues about identity, truth, reality. It soon becomes clear that Born is possibly not the only unreliable narrator in our midst. James presents the reader with a second manuscript (titled “Summer,” after the promising yet cruel arrival of “Spring”), this one told in second person, present tense. This means we experience Walker’s description of events after his fallout with Born, working numbly in the stacks of the New York Public Library and sharing an apartment with his sister Gwyn. The section is written in a literary voice — second person — that is both distancing and oddly intimate. (“It is early July and you and your sister have been living together for two weeks now”)

Working in the stacks, delivering rare books from the belly of the library to customers aboveground, Adam eats himself up with guilt over what transpired with Born, and takes solace in the apartment that he shares with Gwyn. It’s no coincidence that Adam pores over rare editions of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes at work. He experiences his own fall from grace in New York City, late 1967, and the remainder of the book brings us up to the present day, where a dying Walker sends his final scrawled notes (this time written in third person, titled “Fall”) to James and tries to set things straight with his reluctant “translator.” Of course, it’s a given that James will alter the textual world even more with his own editing and presentation of the material.

Since his three-in-one-novel debut in 1987, New York Trilogy, Auster has explored various interpretations of text: the three stories there were subtly interwoven, always pointing back to their creator — Paul Auster — or at least his fictional counterpart. Auster was the ür-postmodern writer of his times, or at least of Newark, New Jersey. There’s the same odd clarity to his writing here, a dissection of reality suggesting Kafka at times, mixed with the vulnerability of Raymond Chandler.

There’s something almost schematic, telegraphic to Auster’s work. We are presented with certain clichéd situations — things straight out of crime thrillers, pulp noir, like a kid brandishing a gun in Central Park, a man with a switchblade at the ready in his breast pocket, a French woman wearing black. But Auster wants us to consider these chestnut scenarios in a new light; he sets up familiar stereotypes, then has the reader deal with the consequences, which are always carefully reasoned out yet perplexing nonetheless.

I picked up faint strains of another New York writer and resident while reading parts of Invisible: E.L. Doctorow, specifically The Book of Daniel, a fictional story of a brother and sister who survive after their parents are executed for espionage during the Cold War witch hunts of the 1950s. Loosely based on the events surrounding Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s deaths, Doctorow has Daniel, the surviving, guilt-ridden son, switching from first- to second-, then to third-person narrative and back again in an attempt to find the right voice to express his place in the narrative. The resemblance between Walker’s narrative voice and Daniel’s is surely coincidental, though the two books share themes of guilt, identity and truth.

Invisible has been called a masterpiece, and there are trademark Austerian themes here: the doubling of Walker and Born, for instance, even down to their names and a description given to each of them by a female in the book (“You’re an impossible man!”). As in earlier work, Auster shows us how meaning can only be constructed through language, and how language can be the most deceptive and difficult tool there is.

But the four-part structure of Invisible has a stitched-together, unfinished quality to it that is somewhat unnerving; many events are left unexplained (or we’re left questioning if they actually happened) and the shifts in narrative voice and gaps in time almost feel like trying to reconstruct reality after a night of blackout drinking. Then there’s the ending, one of the most open-ended and enigmatic among Auster’s 15 novels. (Though he seems to be positing a whole new form of language with his final image.)

Aside from this, Auster remains a gifted storyteller. Most of Invisible flies by like a Dan Brown page-turner (not meant as an unflattering comparison; simply that Auster can tell a story and keep you turning pages). It helps that there’s a passionate pulse here; Invisible has several impossible affairs up its sleeve, imbroglios both romantic and risky that keep us reading, But with Auster, there’s always the understanding that plot is beside the point; his novels test out ideas, much as Raskalnikov tested out an idea, and readers are often stunned by the results.