Man In The Dark by Paul Auster

Be warned – this is far removed from the typical fare of Men Reading Books.

Call them the Family Funk. August Brill is a 72 yo retired book critic who is recuperating from a near fatal car wreck at his daughter Miriam’s house who has just had her daughter Katya move back in after dropping out of film school.

Why the Funk? August is still struggling with the recent death of his wife, Sonya. Miriam is a English prof whose husband dumped her and now has retreated into researching the life of a daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. And Katya is still struggling with the death of her boyfriend Titus. This New England farmhouse has a really black cloud hanging over it. Miriam is mostly absent so August and Katya retreat from their respective worlds with daily viewings of classic film (not “movies” which are so prosaic. The great questions of life are addressed in “film”). In these films they try to find reasons for their weird world.

To make things worse, August has insomnia. To pass the time at night, he manufactures a story of an alternate reality. In his imagined world, 9/11 never happened. The 2000 election plunged the US into a civil war with millions being killed. His hero, a NY children’s magician Owen Brick, appears out of nowhere in a deep hole dressed as a soldier. He is pulled up by a sergeant and told to find a specific source for instructions to kill a man whose imagination has produced this particular reality – a man named August Brill. Kill him and the horror of this war disappears. Fail, and the old reality disappears. Brill takes Owen Brick through the past of August Brill that includes a number of people from Brill’s past.

One night, Katya hears August coughing and checks in on him. The rest of the night (half the book), August answers Katya’s questions about him and her grandmother. August tells of their first meeting, their courtship, the early years of marriage, of a few years living in Paris, his infidelity, divorce, 9yrs of whoring, his reconciliation with Sonya, and then her cancer. August tells Katya of a number of very dark scenes of horrific death (for example, a European neighbor tells of a favored school teacher who was in the resistance during WWII, was captured only to be drawn and quartered in a German POW camp as an example to the other prisoners). Katya and August relive the circumstances around the death of Titus and just how they came to actually see how Titus died.

Was I right? Not our usual fare. I wish I could remember why I reserved this from the library. The jacket liner wouldn’t have convinced me to check it out. But I found myself drawn into Brick’s world, then Brill’s past, and finally Katya’s tragic loss. Austen deftly depicts the guilt and shame of each without requiring pity from the reader.

I read some reviews of this book and author. I must be a bit on the old side. Apparently, Auster is a staple of literature courses in college today and his prior titles are well reviewed. This is a short book, easily read in a couple sessions; a whopping 180 pages in a 5x8” book. Guessing that Auster has quite a knack for dark, disturbing, and psychological tales. Worth another try.

. . . and the weird world rolls on.

East Coast Don