The Tired, Old Master

Paul Auster’s new and short novel Baumgartner, which portrays the grief of an aging philosopher, is mediocre: cliched and predictable at every level of its construction. It reads as if Auster told himself that it was time to write an austere, “late” novel–masterly, profound, serious. Instead, Baumgartner is pretentious. Baumgartner seems to feel all the things a very sad, grieving character would feel. Nothing deepens: the logic inscribed on the first page merely unfolds at its self-satisfied leisure.