Paul Auster is a writer’s writer, or to his critics a writer that is self-indulgently always looking inward and is all style over substance. However, a discussion of postmodern or late twentieth American literature would be vastly incomplete without acknowledging the great contribution that Auster has made to it. Auster continually reinvents or breaks the rules of conventional fiction in order to comment on the construction of fiction itself. However like a good poet who must know the strictures of poetic form if they are to break them successfully, Auster is equally versed in the traditional conventions of prose, showing how the subversion of these conventions can inform a commentary on contemporary writing. As the critic Paul Jashan says, Auster is one of the major authors that continues the shift that started with modernism, from “a readerly to a writerly concept of writing.” In other words the reader cannot sit back and be entertained, they must also interpret in the manner of a literary detective as Auster explored to its limits in The New York Trilogy.
This is evident from the opening of Moon Palace, in which the narrator Marco Stanley Fogg describes how everything in his apartment is built out of boxes of books, six for his bed, four for his table, one for a chair etc. This is Auster setting out in the clearest metaphorical terms his structural artifice. Like in the New York Trilogy his characters names always have literary significance but Auster loves to pre-empt interpretation by having the characters explain there own etymology, acknowledging their fictional status throughout the book. Fogg does this from the outset, referencing Marco Polo and Phileas Fogg and how he came to initialise his name to M.S. which is of course shorthand for manuscript; Fogg is born and will die between the pages of a novel. His narration opens when he is at college in New York but he soon begins the first of his many stories, of the death of his mother and his subsequent upbringing by his Uncle Victor, a Beckettian character in shabby suits with a love for the clarinet. The two of them live an us against the world, escapist life of fictional countries and baseball statistics (a trope that features in almost every Auster novel). Auster constantly weaves a two-fold life for his characters of everyday Americana and a plethora of European cultural references, simultaneously looking to the past and the future, in terms of literary and cultural traditions and new forms of writing and interpretation.
Returning to the present, Fogg is devastated when he hears news of the death of his uncle and sinks into a self-imposed state of isolation and penury; there is a poignant scene where he breaks down after dropping the two eggs which is his sole daily intake of food. He is evicted from his apartment and goes to live in Central Park, where his physical and mental state dramatically decline, culminating in him crawling into a cave, hallucinating for three days and finally being rescued by two college friends in a messianic esque resurrection. He then becomes a live in carer and amanuensis to an eccentric wheelchair bound old man named Thomas Effing. Prior to this the novel is slightly in danger of getting lost in Fogg’s overly self-conscious way of speaking and being for example lecturing a prostitute on the poems of Walter Raleigh whilst taking her clothes off. It improves greatly when Fogg become the vehicle for other stories that expand the novel across the American century and landscape.
The novel owes much to 19th century bildungsroman genre as Fogg tells the story of his personal odyssey. However it is also wholly contemporary in its acknowledgement of the unreliability of its narration and the unapologetic use of coincidence after coincidence; though to reveal even one would be the equivalent of pulling a playing card out of a house cards (and there is indeed a piece of symbolism akin to this near the end of the novel). This is an analogy that critics would think appropriately describes the structural integrity of Auster’s plots. It also owes much to the use of narrative framing of Fitzgerald and Cather, whereby the writer paints pictures of scenes within scenes, a room for example with an open window showing a natural landscape in the background. Fogg tells his own life story and within it that of Julian Barber who is a kind of Gatsby figure in the way he transforms himself into Thomas Effing. Effing’s story as dictated to Fogg and then narrated to the reader reveals how the reader must always question the interpretation at each level of narrative transition and translation. As a young man Effing or Barber as he was then called was a great painter and leaves his wife to go out to Utah to paint the barren, moonscape rocks and see the mesa of the native Americans.
The novel moves into Cather esque frontier territory here with several echoes of The Professor’s House. Mirroring Fogg’s stay in Central Park, Barber after days in the desert comes across a house built into a cave in which a man has recently been murdered. He stays there for several months taking on the man’s identity, later learning that he was part of an outlaw gang but was murdered by them. When the outlaws return, Effing murders them and takes their loot, returning East before leaving for France, but as spacious and lengthy this section is, the rest of his life is breezily glossed over. Effing and Fogg then battle for months over the finalising of this obituary, down to the punctuation which is a manifestation of the struggles an author goes through in perfecting their prose, the notion of the ghost of every word, phrase or sentence rejected lying beneath those that remain in the text. The finalising of the obituary liberates Effing and there is an extraordinary conclusion to Fogg’s time with him, which gives Effing closure to the events in Utah.
The final part of the novel introduces a third major character that bridges together the two halves of Fogg’s and then Effing’s narration (as told by Fogg) and is of course told by Fogg himself. To add a further level of artifice this character is a writer himself, and there is a novel within a novel section in which Fogg analyses his pulp-fiction fantasy tale (with hints of Gulliver’s Travels) for autobiographical influence, much in the same way as scholars of Auster would look for clues from his own life in Moon Palace (born in 1947 like Fogg, did not know his father, studied in New York) to name three. The multitude of narrative strands, tropes in particular the many meanings of the title, and the story of three generations of Fogg’s family come together as the novel is neatly and symmetrically resolved.
Auster is simultaneously a unique writer whose style is impossible to characterise and pin down and yet also one who is so open in his cannibalisation of other forms and Moon Palace owes much to Dickens, Cervantes, Swift, Cather and Fitzgerald to name a few. In The Art of Hunger Joseph Mallia interviewing Auster quotes him citing Beckett saying “There will be a new form” before asking Auster “Is your work an example of that new form?” Auster replies that a book will “create its own form.” His recent novels Invisible and Sunset Park have seen a different side to his writing, more at ease with convention and plot and a more grounded reflection of real events, particularly that of the recession in Sunset Park. Moon Palace though is Auster at the height of his experimental and literary powers.
London to Norway 