The Book of Illusions
By Paul Auster
Holt, 321 pages, $24
Paul Auster loves stories. He has told many over the course of writing 10 novels, and collected dozens of electrifying “true” tales in the deeply affecting, often unnerving anthology “I Thought My Father Was God.” So tantalized is he by how stories reflect life’s complexity–its vagaries and patterns, tilt toward chaos and proclivity for coincidence–and by how new stories sprout from those that have been told before, he inlays stories within stories within stories to create novels rife with mysterious connections and resonant with echoes of myths and tales of old. Highly polished, playful yet intense, his books, in which every element–no matter how small–is laden with meaning, possess the same gleaming intimation of infinity as that captured in the endlessly repeating reflections in a hall of mirrors, the same dizzying plunge into multiplicity and illusion.
Auster is particularly fascinated with how one fluky occurrence can change the course of a life, like the wrong number that launches his novel “City of Glass,” the first in the acclaimed New York Trilogy, or the narrator’s impulsive decision to give a ride to a stranger in “The Music of Chance,” just “one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air” and alter everything. This particular protagonist of Auster’s makes his snap decision while in the grip of a prolonged malaise, figuring he had nothing left to lose. David Zimmer, Auster’s newest victim of fate, has also hit bottom.
A professor of comparative literature at a small Vermont college, David has lost his beloved wife and two young sons in a plane crash, and his grief is so profound and unrelenting, nearly voluptuous in its oceanic pull, he has remained sunk in a stuporous, frequently suicidal depression for months. Then suddenly, on a typically mournful night, he begins a slow ascent. As usual, he’s slumped before the TV “mindlessly surfing channels” when his attention is snared by a documentary about silent-film comedians, many unknown to him. Late in the program a clip from one of Hector Mann’s short films comes on, and something about the mustachioed actor cuts through David’s gloom, and he finds himself laughing. So astonishing is this breakthrough, and so intriguing is Hector’s story, David has an epiphany: He’ll embark on a quest to see Hector’s far-flung surviving films, a journey he believes may well be the path to his own survival.
It seems that Hector, a “talented gagman with exceptional body control,” disappeared from his Hollywood home in 1929 and vanished into thin air, never to be heard from again. With the advent of talkies he was all but forgotten, and nine of his 12 films were lost. The nine abruptly resurfaced 50 years later, when pristine copies were mailed anonymously to film archives in the U.S. and Europe. David travels to each institution and becomes so involved in analyzing Hector’s work, and derives so much comfort from his stylized, black-and-white comedic world, that he writes a book about it. Then, not long after its release, he receives a bewildering note from a woman in New Mexico named Frieda Spelling who claims to be Hector Mann’s wife. She writes that Hector has read his book and would like to meet him.
David tells his entrancing story in retrospect, and his tale is a compelling one, but he is, nonetheless, primarily a conduit for Hector’s even more spellbinding story. This, of course, is a classic novelist’s device, to have one character become enthralled by another and devote himself to an inquiry into the life and work of the object of his fascination. Auster used this wily narrative form to fine effect in two of his earlier books, “Moon Palace” and “Leviathan,” and he perfects it here in his most compulsively readable, lushly imagined and deeply pleasurable novel.
And he goes one step further in his layering of narrative platforms. As ardent in his love of film (he has three to his writing and/or directing credit: “Smoke,” “Blue in the Face” and “Lulu on the Bridge”) as he is passionate about literature, Auster has a gloriously good time combining the two in shot-by-shot descriptions of Hector’s movies, works captivating in their own right, and an elegant means for illuminating Hector’s complicated psyche.
These films exist only in words, yet Auster’s cinematic passages are so fluid and vivid, and his narrator’s interpretations of them are so convincing, readers feel as though they’ve actually seen Hector’s richly semiotic comedies, actually watched the “Morse code” of his amazingly mobile and expressive mustache, and absorbed the startling luminosity of his white suit, an emblem of his purity and vulnerability as it becomes a target for every sullying force in his “booby-trapped universe,” a metaphor for Hector’s own woeful life and, by extension, David’s.
Naturally, David is skeptical about the strange letter from New Mexico and writes back, asking for more information, but the correspondence ceases as mysteriously as it began, leaving David to soldier on in his self-perpetuated loneliness. Hector’s art has brought David back to life, but it hasn’t dispelled his sorrow. He has only progressed to the level of “the living dead,” and feels as though “the world was an illusion that had to be reinvented every day.”
So sunk in his mind’s darkness is this brooding hermit that he’s utterly flummoxed by the surprise visit of a determined young woman with the unlikely name of Alma Grund and an extravagant facial birthmark. Alma has come to take David to New Mexico, at gunpoint if necessary. Hector is at death’s door, she declares, and there’s no time to waste. After David and Alma’s high-voltage confrontation nearly turns lethal, David, shaken to the core, finally agrees to accompany her. As they head west, she tells him all she has learned about Hector over the nearly seven years she has spent writing his biography, adding yet one more narrative-within-the-narrative in Auster’s ever-expanding, marvelously noir-Gothic drama.
Alma takes David, and the reader, back to 1929, when Hector’s days before the camera are numbered. Sound was in the wings, and he knew that his heavy Spanish accent would be unacceptable to American moviegoers. But before he faces that difficulty, tragedy strikes: A jilted lover, the seemingly jaunty but actually fragile reporter Brigid O’Fallon, turns up pregnant and raving, and, in a terrible scene of hysteria and fear right out of a B-movie, is accidentally killed. Hector conceals all evidence of her death and flees, exiling himself and taking on a new identity (as he has before).
His wanderings carry him to Spokane, Wash., Brigid’s hometown, where, in an act of awful hubris and morbid helplessness, he befriends her youngest sister (there were three), and goes to work for her widower father. This vertiginous misadventure, with its aura of Homeric fatefulness and allusions to King Lear, leads to an otherworldly interlude of hellish debauchery in Chicago, followed by a heroic, life-threatening act of redemption during a bank robbery in Sandusky, Ohio, Frieda’s hometown. Wealthy, artistic and willful, Frieda recognizes, marries and thus rescues the former film star and director.
David listens in stunned amazement as Alma explains that guilt over Brigid’s death induced Hector to swear never to make films again as a form of penance, but that, years later, another tragedy drove him back to filmmaking as the only way to save his sanity. He justifies the breaking of his vow by making “a pact with the devil” (Do we hear reverberations of Thomas Mann’s “Dr. Faustus?): No one will ever see the poetic and daring films he makes except those involved in their secret production, including Alma’s cameraman father and actress mother. When Hector dies, his wife will burn every reel. Now David has been chosen as the only exception to the rule: If he comes with Alma this instant, he will be allowed to watch each doomed film once before its incineration.
Auster explores the mirroring of life in art and art in life at a feverish pitch once he gathers his main characters together in the bizarre world of the New Mexico ranch, pulling out all the stops as he describes films of eerie, metaphysical beauty and scenes of love and violence among his high-strung cast members. Ultimately his many-faceted tale traces the thin line between guilt and innocence, madness and obsession; illuminates the self’s various guises; and questions the cherished illusion that although we die, art lives on, immortal and sacrosanct. In fact, most art is lost, Auster avers, and only chance and serendipity preserve those works we hold dear. Even so, in a world of mayhem, grief and death, art, however fleeting, does offer order, grace and sanctuary. It does help us, as Auster’s heroes learn, to live in hope.
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Donna Seaman selected and introduced the anthology “In Our Nature: Stories of Wildness,” is an editor at Booklist and hosts the radio program “Open Books in Chicago” on WLUW 88.7-FM.
