WHEN confronted with events as inconceivable and world-changing as the attacks on the Twin Towers, it is unsurprising that many novelists retreat to familiar tropes and recognisable themes – into their comfort zones, if you like – if they try to des
cribe the events.
So, Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close played out the same linguistic hi-jinks and sentimental pirouettes as his debut, Everything Is Illuminated. Martin Amis, the ageing enfant terrible, blames it all on Mohammad Atta's constipation and sexual frustration. John Updike blames sexual frustration and class anxieties. Ian McEwan blames it all on anxiety. Even Don DeLillo ended up retreading his usual obsessions with adultery, conspiracy and celebrity.
By far the most successful attempt so far has been the most traditional: Claire Messud's The Emperor's New Children, which makes a melancholy comedy of manners out of the unassuming pre-September 11 months. So what happens when the formidable Paul Auster, author of contemporary masterpieces like The Brooklyn Follies, The Music Of Chance and the New York Trilogy, attempts an "11/9 novel"? The answer is Man In The Dark, a slim (180 pages) and slight novella with a predictably Auster-esque conceit.
August Brill is a 72-year-old, recently widowed author recovering from a broken leg and living with his divorced daughter Miriam and depressed grand-daughter Katya. Miriam is struggling with a biography of Rose Hawthorne, the aspiring author daughter of the more famous Nathaniel, and Katya endlessly watches movies to distract her from her grief over ex-boyfriend Titus, who was killed in Iraq. Oh, and he wanted to be a novelist too. Sometimes there are just too many writers in a story.
Since August can't sleep, he makes up stories. On the night in question, he begins by putting a magician, Owen Brick, in a hole. Why's he there? Why can he hear machine guns? A helpful sergeant pulls him out and explains that he's not in Iraq but America. Gradually we learn the Twin Towers never fell, and Bush never got to the White House, as the disputed election of 2000 turned into full-out civil war.
Brill expands this alternative universe. It turns out that in the "multiverse" – which owes more to DC and Marvel than Hugh Everett, Jorge Luis Borges or Andrew Crumey – Brick has to assassinate the mind that created this dreadful parallel reality: the novelist August Brill. The Auster take on terror is to imagine an author imagining a world where it never happened. It's a side issue, and the 'it's all just stories' aesthetic tends to act as a 'get out of jail free' card, but the idea that Bush winning led directly to Bin Laden attacking seems pretty suspect to me.
Auster is always eloquent, but the chiselled prose can't compensate for the narrative weakness of Man In The Dark. The plot blocks itself into a corner, and the meagre fable is expanded by Katya and August discussing film, war and family history – his adultery and reconciliation, fables about the human spirit under duress; all loosely connected by a banal interchange with Katya: "Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?" "Because it is, that's all. It just is."
Part of the problem is the very structure that Auster has excelled at in the past. Brill categorically doesn't want to think about terror, and the revelation of what happened to Titus is the one real emotional punch in the book. But it is flagged up so quickly that most of the content is simply whistling in the dark. We know the whole time this is a distraction from the human reality of the piece, so it is difficult to care what happens to Brick, or what Brill thinks of the films of Renoir or De Sica, or even the otherwise affecting accounts of conflicted Nazis and dutiful French spies.
Auster has always been the master of the story-within-a-story form of postmodernist writing, but here it seems like anecdotal padding. Indeed, the whole reason Miriam is writing on Hawthorne seems to be so Brill can quote and discuss her one good line of poetry: "As the weird world rolls on". "Watch the birdie" – as the magician Brick would know – doesn't work if you're saying "Watch the birdie because the real trick is being done with my other hand."
The full article contains 738 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
