Paul Auster and I have a history together.  It’s not much of a history and I’m sure that memories of it are essentially only archived by me, but nonetheless I thought I should let you know as I write this post, particularly when I mention that I’m not sure that I liked his book.

From the beginning, Man in the Dark tells two stories simultaneously.  In one, our first person narrator, August Brill,  lies in bed in the real world waiting for morning to come and thinking to some degree about his life.  He has a shattered leg and a well full of regrets.  The story-inside-the-story is being spun by our narrator and plunges us into an alternate reality America where 9/11 and Iraq never happened and instead the U.S. has been devastated by civil war.  Into this fictional world within our fictional world, a man named Owen Brick appears, as confused as the reader about what is happening there.

Auster likes to play with the artifice of writing and often includes writers (that are sometimes named Paul Auster) in his work.  I usually find that this kind of structure alienates me from the story, but as Man in the Dark gets rolling, the Owen Brick story becomes deeply compelling.  We discover that the civil war is a story being told within the head of a man named August Brill and that Brick must go to the real world and kill him.  Confusing for sure, but Auster navigates it with a sure hand.  For 120 pages (of this slim 180 page book), the reader is completely enthralled.

Then, abruptly and without any sense of reason, the Owen Brick part of the book ends unresolved, leaving us with only August Brill in the real world.  Unfortunately for me, it was the Brick story — which had absurdist satirical overtones similar to Heller and Vonnegut — that I wanted to finish reading.  Instead, I found myself trapped with August Brill and his granddaughter in an endless conversation that walked me through his life and mistakes.  Honestly, the story is pretty interesting, if it had actually been told as a story.  But as a conversation between two people who are doing nothing but lying in the dark, well, let’s just say it felt a little like My Dinner With Andre.  Maybe if Brill was truly incapacitated, such as in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, such a device might have been compelling.

Auster does have a gruesome scene to write at the end, but even that lacks impact mainly because the characters who should be destroyed by their role in its occurrence are let off the hook before we see the awful moment itself.

But enough about the book.  Remember, there is history here.  When I was at Princeton, I had Auster as a professor for a creative writing seminar.  I was either a freshman or sophomore.  About ten of us would meet once a week in his office, which I remember as a small cramped space filled with books.  Auster himself scared me.  I remember him — and here I must point out that my memories may have little bearing on reality — with a perpetual scowl and a leather jacket.  We disappointed him.

Of course, there was good reason for that.  After all, we were too young to be able to write much of value.  Auster tried to get us to at least read.  He assigned us Swann’s Way by Proust.  Each week, he’d ask us what we thought of the pages he’d told us to get through, and we’d all look away and finally admit we hadn’t read it.  Did I mention the creative writing seminar was pass/fail, and to pass you really just needed to hand in stories for critique?

Our first session, Auster asked us about writers we admired.  I mentioned Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, both of whom also taught at Princeton.  His comment was that maybe I should have taken one of their classes.  Not a great way to start.

So there it is.  I let Paul Auster down.  I have the stories I gave him in that seminar still on my hard drive.  But MS Word can’t read them - I get only gibberish when I open them.  That seems fitting.  And back then I bought his books too.  The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace.  When I took them down from my shelf this week, literally dusting them off, to take another look, I found a 20-year-old bookmark in each of them, still marking the places where I had stopped reading in 1989.

The thing is that I bought Man in the Dark to make amends.  I saw it in the bookstore (and an independent bookstore at that) and I decided to give my relationship with Paul Auster another try.  I realized that at the time I was at Princeton, Auster was only a few years older than I am now.  And although he was relatively well-known by then, he was at the start of his career as a novelist.  I felt that I was now in a similar place that might allow me to understand him and his work a little better.  That maybe I could untangle why I wasn’t able to take advantage of learning from him two decades earlier.

And for two-thirds of Man in the Dark I thought I would get there.  Then, the book let me down.  Or I let it down by not understanding it.  Either way, I think this effectively lets me close the door on what I have always viewed as a missed opportunity (though I am still left with a lingering sadness about having missed it in the first place).

(Of course, I did go on at Princeton to have seminars with both Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, but those are other stories for another time or, in a nod to Mr. Auster and homework undone, another madeleine.)