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.

Auster’s protagonist, Sy Baumgartner (a name which alludes to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the father of aesthetics–for some reason!) is a 71-year-old philosophy professor at Princeton, grappling with the breakdown of his body and the enduring loneliness that has set in since his wife Anna died a decade ago in a swimming accident. He is also experiencing some kind of dissociation from his body, which makes it difficult for him to feel physical pain (literalizing the classic philosophical quandary known as the “mind-body problem”). In his strange, dissociated state, Baumgartner reads Kierkegaard, edits his late wife’s poems, and writes supposedly philosophical prose poems–which Auster interpolates, like Anna’s poems, whenever the narrative loses momentum (which is often).

However, the story seems limited by its own commitment to wintery-ness and old-man pathos–lacking the invention to surprise itself. Baumgartner’s literary devices, including flashbacks, callbacks to old Auster fiction, and the interpolated texts-within-in-a-text, fail to save the limpid prose.

There are so many moments when one wants to cut unnecessary or redundant words. In one flashback, for instance, a relative is described as “struck down” by a “gigantic, thunderbolt heart attack.” Do we need either adjective? Baumgartner thinks of the world around him as a “red flame burning on the surface of his eyelids” as if just “flame” were not evocative enough. Anna and Baumgartner’s wedding “blossom[s] into a full-blown, high-cost extravaganza”–which I suppose means expensive. At one point Baumgartner is described as having “dreamed the dream.” It’s possible that the bad prose is part of the novel’s tired attempts at play and self-reference (is the prose supposed to suffer from the mind-body problem too–is it also dissociated?), but I think it is more likely that Auster is too famous to be properly edited anymore.

Baumgartner’s relationship with Anna, as revealed through flashbacks, is simply a picture of well-to-do Boomers, who are individuated only by their high-culture aspirations and references. We see predictably idealized snippets of their youth together–in Paris and 70’s New York–sexy and bohemian. Baumgartner’s flashbacks to his youth and his mother–the other idealized woman in his life–are similarly dull; his mother, a seamstress in Newark, watches the city die around her while she dies of cancer. Newark is just like Baumgartner's mother: predictably tragic.

Too much of the book is steeped in idealization, particularly evident in the portrayal of characters. Anna is presented as an immense literary talent, even though the poems attributed to her lack substantial artistic merit. Baumgartner's 1980s apartment in New York is depicted as the “crummiest rat trap imaginable” while his old neighborhood spots are nostalgically labeled “old haunts.” Elsewhere, an aspiring actress is remembered as “sad-eyed.”

Much of the book only works if you accept that you are tracing out the thoughts of very interesting and intelligent people. Anna–who (in noble, dignified fashion) never published her poems when she was alive–is, in Baumgartner’s eyes, a genius; Auster never questions or ironizes this perspective; much of the drama of the book is centered on the question of whether other people will like her work too. There seems to be no question, for Baumgartner, whose consciousness is the novel, whether Anna’s poems are brilliant. It would be interesting if they weren’t–if Baumgartner had to mourn a wife that wasn’t a literary genius–but she is, and that’s that.

Baumgartner (“a lone traveler navigating through mysterious ontological realms”) produces philosophical reflections, meanwhile, which are not particularly strong either (so it shouldn’t surprise us that he finds Anna’s poetry original). He seems to think all the things an untalented philosophy professor would think if they were thinking about what kind of grief they were supposed to feel and how it connects to the cosmos. Baumgarter believes that Anna exists in some “disembodied afterlife”—“subatomic outposts in the vast unknown.” This is general enough, and vague enough, to sound deep–and that’s where Auster stops. Baumgartner is sad; Anna is dead and a genius; the afterlife is promisingly mystical and yet also science-y. Newark symbolizes a lost American golden age.

To an emeritus postmodernist like Auster, this is a rhetorical question; to fiction readers and writers in a new age of infinitely replicating and self-generating texts, this question opens into an abyss. It is not enough for Auster to sound like himself, to rehearse the old intertextual performance of his early works in the mood of a late work; it is this impulse–the impulse to repeat oneself, and to repeat a certain literary history (late work-ness)–that Auster should have turned against himself. Baumgartner is old, decaying, and naively sentimental, and no amount of interpolated text or philosophical music can make up for the lack of self-examination that he, and by extension, his author, fail to promote.

Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.