The Red Notebook
Paul Auster
Faber & Faber pbk, 175 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
Whatever other occupations you may try to strap aboard the good ship Auster, it's a fair bet his passport would plump for "storyteller". Of course, the novelist is storyteller by definition, and with books like The New York Trilogy and the underrated Mr. Vertigo he is most certainly that. But so is a film-maker, and Auster's recent collaborations with Wayne Wang on Smoke and Blue In The Face nudge him, however vaguely, in that direction too. But then he can also lay claim to a career as poet, translator, essayist: your actual renaissance man of letters. All, in the end, ways of telling a story, be it real, culled from his fertile imagination, or, more likely, a mixture of the both.
The Red Notebook is not fiction. It collects together a variety of pieces spanning several years and most strands of his active career; taken as a whole they make a stab at explaining a most complex character. Auster is not the kind to try and mystify the writing process, and yet, the more he explains - the more he lays process and idea bare on the examination table - the more layers, the more elaborations arise from his words. If he's here to make himself transparent, The Red Notebook seems only to conceal.
The eponymous piece itself is an assembly of observations - all true he assures - about the influence of coincidence on everyday life. Chance, he tells us, is a marvellous thing, and if these tales are indeed authentic - suddenly running into old friends; a woman who married her own brother; the odd telephone incident that inspired his first novel, City of Glass - then it plays an astonishing part in Auster's life. There must be an angels sitting on his shoulder.
Beautiful, lucidly written, they read like outlines for short stories, novels even. Their penetration of the extraordinary recalls nothing so much as the casual magic of Jonathan Carroll. Here, as there, lest we take these for simple whimsy, the dark and the disquieting are given equal weight.
Less successful on the whole are three book prefaces: one (almost impenetrable) from The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry; another (only slightly more approachable) to Stephane Mallarme's A Tomb for Anatole; the last (and by far the best) taken from a book by highwire artist Philippe Petit. Context, it would seem, is everything. (Not to mention the vague impression that the last, as alluring as it is, it could easily be a fiction in itself.) Better are the three interviews, the longest of which, from 1993, is a superbly honest examination of Austerian method and practice.
We could quibble with the occasional repetition between writing and interview, and certainly the ordering of material is irritating. The surreal, disturbing death-by-lightning he witnessed as a boy is a powerful and powerfully strange piece. It turns up, carefully written, at the end of the book, its thunder effectively stolen by an interview elsewhere. It's a mistake not repeated by the sensational final observation though. An ostensible tale of childhood disappointment, it actually reveals - in a section called Why Write? - how Auster was destined to make his mark in print. For these few hundred precise, luminous, joyous words alone The Red Notebook comes heartily recommended.