Paul Auster may have a reputation as a “writer’s
writer” --- one whose technical expertise and mastery of his
craft is viewed with alternating envy, inspiration and despair by
less skilled writers. But he also knows how to tell a darn good
story as he has demonstrated time and again in novels such as CITY
OF GLASS, ORACLE NIGHT and MAN IN THE DARK. In his 15th work of
fiction, INVISIBLE, Auster dazzlingly displays both his technical
and storytelling talents in a mature novel that skillfully brings
together many of the themes of his life’s work.

In many ways, what is important in INVISIBLE is not so much the
story itself but how it is told. The novel is divided into four
parts with three different narrators, who write in three different
voices (the first, second and third person points of view). The
issue of narrative voice --- how and why writers choose to tell a
story in that particular voice --- is at the heart of the novel:
“By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered
myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to
find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from
myself…” So maybe the claims of Auster being a
writer’s writer is true after all, but he is also one who can
get readers thinking about how the way stories are told influences
the way we read them.

The central figure of the novel --- and the primary narrator of
the first two sections --- is Adam Walker, an aspiring poet who is
in his second year at Columbia University in 1967, the year in
which the story opens and from which everything else sprouts. A
chance encounter at a party draws Walker in to the gravitational
orbit of beguiling Frenchman Rudolf Born and his alluring
companion, Margot. Born promises Walker certain things --- certain
desirable things that shake Walker out of his undergraduate torpor
and show him a different way of living. Ultimately, however, a
series of betrayals by Walker, by Margot, and, most notably, by
Born changes the stakes for Walker and alters the course of his
life.

What happens in the subsequent sections is both difficult to
describe and largely irrelevant to this review; suffice it to say
that the events force Walker to solicit the help of Jim, a former
classmate of his at Columbia. Jim’s role is to help Walker
tell the story of what happened after that pivotal spring, of how
his ongoing obsession, revulsion and fascination with Born shaped
everything that happened after. And as good stories tend to do,
Walker’s manages to draw Jim into his tale, and, as events
unfold, both Jim and, eventually, the reader ask the question:
“What is truth? What is story? What exactly is this
collection of words that I hold in my hand?”

At times, reading INVISIBLE can feel like riding in a
fast-moving taxi steered by an eminently capable driver who
nonetheless tends to take corners so fast that passengers
don’t feel like they’ve caught up until blocks later.
Nevertheless, the passengers are thrilled and grateful that
they’ve signed up for the wild ride. Auster’s
constantly shifting parameters demand a lot from readers, but they
also provide both rigorous intellectual stimulation and the joy of
a well-told story. INVISIBLE is a page-turner; readers keep reading
because they want to know not only what’s going to happen but
also how the author is going to get us there.

Ultimately, that is one of the biggest themes of the novel: how
the telling of stories --- how they’re told, to whom
they’re told, when they’re told --- has the power to
alter circumstances far outside their original realm. Sure,
Auster’s postmodern sensibilities are still very much on
display here (as an inside joke to long-time readers, he mentions
that some unnamed authors insert characters with their own names
into their fiction), but INVISIBLE is a forceful demonstration that
the mature Auster can marry his “writerliness” with
surprising, compelling narrative. The result is a novel in which
the story and how it is told are fascinatingly inseparable.