INVISIBLE
Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Company
Fiction
ISBN: 9780805090802
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.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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