Wed, January 14, 2004

I really hesitated to initiate a book review section because it's just going to highlight how infrequently I read. However, I haven't been to the movies in weeks, and I just finished a book two nights ago, so this is what I have to work with. Besides, now I can sound all literate like Big Joe.

This Christmas, I received a copy of The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster. You may remember him from the movies Smoke and Blue in the Face. They came out a while back, and I don't remember much about them but I think they were partially improvised. Smoke had William Hurt and Harvey Keitel and I watched it because I was a projectionist at the time and a film-student-to-be, so it seemed like a smart move and worth the price. I remember very little about the film, but I own the soundtrack CD because it has some fantastic Tom Waits songs on it. (I still haven't started talking about the book. Can you tell what a big reader I am? Actually, can you tell that it's 2:30 in the damn morning?)

The Book of Illusions tells the story of a literature professor whose wife and young sons have recently died in a plane crash. Yeah, it's that kind of book. Which is interesting because I don't read really serious fiction stories that often, and they usually turn out to be pretty compelling. It immediately reminded me of Fearless, and not just because of the fact that there's a plane crash. A heavy story element like that in the backbone of the narrative creates an immediate writing style that is very distinctive.

The book unfolds into two (or more) different stories fairly quickly, and because I like to skip the back cover and just dive in, I had no idea which one was what the book was "about," which made for a fun read. The professor and narrator, David Zimmer, takes time off from work after the accident and spends a lot of time alone and depressed. The moment that lifts him out of that slump is an old silent comedy on TV featuring a fictitious movie comedian named Hector Mann. Because Mann provides him with his first laugh in months, Zimmer decides to do some research and learn about him, which results in a year-long quest to see all twelve of Mann's short films and write a book about them. In the process he learns about the mysterious disappearance of Hector Mann on January 14, 1929. (Not that the date is particularly important in the story, but it's today's date and it's a date that generally jumps off the page at me. And probably at Jason Bateman and Holland Taylor, too.) The rest of the book is about David's attempt to return to a normal life and Hector's life after his disappearance, as David comes into contact with people who knew Hector and learns about all of his activities after he dropped off the face of the planet.

As a cineaste, I found the discussions of Hector Mann's work to be entirely fascinating. It's not often you get to read a serious academic review of a film that never existed. Auster does an excellent job of devising a filmography for Hector, including the backstory of his rise to fame and his clashes with studio chiefs, and then describing a couple of the films in great detail, giving synopses as well as critical analyses. I can't imagine how someone with less interest in film would find it captivating, but I was enthralled.

The dual storylines are also interesting, although, as so often happens when this device is employed, I ended up vastly preferring Hector's stories to David's and having to fight the urge to skim past David's pages to get back to Hector. Hector's is the story of a man on the run from his past, and takes on the necessarily itinerant pace and framing. It's a gradual characterization through a series of wildly varied backdrops and situations, and it's quite a fascinating way to go about describing someone to the reader. David, on the other hand, is stuffy and intellectual, and frequently talks in a way that I don't even think professors really talk. He spends most of the book moping about the loss of his family, which is not something that I would ever detract from, except to say that at some point it is necessary to move on, and in a story it seems prudent to move on a little more quickly.

One element of Hector's story is a number of months he spends performing live sex shows with a prostitute in Chicago. It's a bizarre and explicit interlude, and it seems out of place, but obviously it's like that for a reason. It caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about how Auster came up with his ideas and what the vetting process was for deciding whether they would go into the story. The entire section is decidedly lewd, and at first I was frustrated by its apparent attempt at shock value. (You know me, I'm no adversary of lewdness; but doing anything simply for the sake of shock value aggravates me.) But I think it's there because it tells us about the depths to which Hector sinks, while also providing a look at the sexual side of his life. Without it, we learn about romance and ambition and guilt and all the other aspects of his personality, but not sex. While I think some of the details are a misguided attempt to make the story feel "raw," I can understand why Auster went this way with the story, and the fact that it feels really out of place with the rest of the book's events is probably a service to the story.

Ultimately, Auster spends too much time trying to surprise us with the unexpected, which is probably why I bristled at the sex romp content. By the end of the book, I was predicting two or three turns ahead, because I had become so accustomed to his reversals and last-minute twists. It's not like he makes it hard; he likes to start dropping unsubtle hints a few pages in advance. Towards the start of the book, this practice is hardly noticeable – by the end, these clues seem like flashing billboard signs. This approach makes the ending somewhat unsatisfying, since it doesn't tie into the action of the story very well. Thematically, it's probably more consistent, but I'm much more aware of the overt when I'm reading, so if there's a glitch in the story, all the thematic harmony in the world isn't going to appease me. Also, the narrator's professor-speak really starts to take over, and we end up with dialogue like "Where is that mouth, then? Let me feel it. Press that mouth against mine... If it feels the way it's supposed to feel, then I'll know it's your mouth and not my mouth. Then maybe I'll start to believe you." Nobody in the universe has ever said this, when "Just kiss me" will do fine. Also, Auster uses no quotation marks for speech, which is one of those little things that just feels presumptuous to me.

These minor quibbles aside, The Book of Illusions was a satisfying foray back into fiction reading after far too many months away. A more enlightened reader could probably separate Zimmer's voice from Auster's and recognize that a lot of his eccentric turns of phrase serve the purpose of defining Zimmer's character. I managed to get through it and enjoyed the exploration of fame, fate, and what it means to create something or devote yourself to a task or a person.

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