MAN IN THE DARK
Paul Auster
Henry Holt
Fiction
ISBN: 9780805088397
"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wildnerness." These are the thoughts of 72-year-old August Brill, tossing and turning as he spends another sleepless night trying --- and ultimately failing --- to keep his mind from wandering through the troubling, sometimes heartbreaking events of his past.
Brill, a consummate writer and book critic, focuses his mind through narrative --- in this case a compelling story of an alternate United States, one that split apart from our current reality after the 2000 Presidential election. In that reality, so-called Blue States seceded from the Federalist states (and their president, George W. Bush) after that contentious election. Civil war erupts, and although the September 11th attacks and the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq never happened, the United States and its people are still torn apart by war.
The protagonist of Brill's story is a man named Owen Brick, who has been snatched out of our universe into that one for a special mission: to assassinate the person who, by creating this story in the first place, created the nightmarish reality. In other words, he's out for August Brill's blood.
This overlapping story-within-a-story is compelling --- for readers and for Brill himself. But, it turns out, not compelling enough to distract Brill entirely from the tragedies --- small and large, past and present --- that have characterized his own life. He is laid up at his daughter Miriam's home in Vermont following a serious car crash. His granddaughter, 23-year-old Katya, has also sought refuge at her mother's home following the death of her long-time boyfriend, Titus.
August's mind wanders through the story of his own marriage to, divorce from and reunion with his late wife Sonia, and through the heartbreaking, more recent events in Miriam's and Katya's lives. The themes of war, betrayal and loss are woven through all these narratives --- as well as through Brill's fantastical fictional narrative --- and culminate in a cathartic exchange between Brill and Katya.
Paul Auster's aficionados will find many echoes of his previous works here: a faceless authority who must be obeyed, a series of nested stories, an at-times disquieting disorientation and, of course, his achingly beautiful, elegantly economical prose. But although MAN IN THE DARK is, like some of Auster's more inaccessible writings, a novel of ideas, it is also compulsively readable and immediately relevant for all readers. Placing immense themes about the wars humans wage on both national and personal levels in a contemporary context, Auster posits his latest book at the intersection of politics and story. The result is a novel that --- like an indelible image from a great film or painting --- will remain with readers for years to come.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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