21st Century Literature discussion

Discuss the whole book here. Full spoilers allowed.

The book has four distinct parts, the first three each relating to one of the three seasonal sections of Walker's book, the fourth relating to Cecile's diary entries about Born. What kind of whole do you think they make?

Did you have an emotional response to the book or to any part of it in particular?

My reaction to the book was a resounding "meh". It was very cleverly written, but I found the characters flat and uninteresting. In the end I didn't believe in or care about any of them, really. The structure was kind of cool, though, even though it didn't really hang together as a story.

Honestly, my primary emotional response was annoyance with the characters.

It's interesting how responses can be so different to a book. Auster in particular seems (judging from his Goodreads reviews) to polarise opinion in just this way.

My primary emotional response was probably exhilaration. I found the book a breathless and complex reflection on what is real and what is to be believed, with very believable and nuanced characters.

I do see easily how they might be less than sympathetic to some, though. Peter, do you find yourself someone who needs to be able to 'get behind' one of the characters to enjoy a book?

As I read this news item this morning, I found my thoughts jumping to Invisible and Auster's exploration of how do we know, even sometimes up close in our own memories or in those of others, what is reality and what is faulty:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-wom...

'A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.'

-- Chuck Palahniuk, 'Fight Club'

I do think it's a fascinating area. We believe in our memories. We believe in our interpretations of reality, of events, and we forget that that's all they are: interpretations. I think this book helps to remind us of that. The more I think about it, the more I admire the book.

How do you feel the title fits in to the narrative? Who or what is Invisible, and how or why is this important to the point of the book?

I do see easily how they might be less than sympathetic to some, though. Peter, do you find yourself someone who needs to be able to 'get behind' one of the characters to enjoy a book?

It doesn't hurt, but I need is a character I find interesting. You see, I didn't find any of these characters nuanced at all, I found them all drearily one-note characters from central casting. Born was pure bombast and ego, Adam was a classic narcissistic 'tortured' poet, etc. None of them really surprised me, and that's a thing a good character will do.

Or, in other words, the characters lessened on me rather than growing on me.

Peter wrote: "...You see, I didn't find any of these characters nuanced at all, I found them all drearily one-note characters from central casting...."

Interesting. I had just been reading Hardy's Jude the Obscure, or perhaps more accurately, articles and books of criticism on it. It is a book that I've never been able to "get." One of the messages from the critics was that Sue and Jude walk that line as authorial character creations somewhere between reality and types. You set me wondering if some of the same applies to the characters in Invisible -- and how that affects what an author can convey as "art."

Terry wrote: "How do you feel the title fits in to the narrative? Who or what is Invisible, and how or why is this important to the point of the book?"

I find the title mystifying. Is the truth invisible? Is evil invisible? Is Born an invisible enigma? Are our true selves invisible to each other - and to ourselves?

Is this book about layers of invisibility?

Sophia wrote: "Terry wrote: "How do you feel the title fits in to the narrative? Who or what is Invisible, and how or why is this important to the point of the book?"

I find the title mystifying. Is the truth i..."

These are more observations and questions than answers, but there are a couple quotes about invisibility in the book that I think point towards Auster’s intent. The first is, from Walker’s Auster-like friend advising him about his writing:

“By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible…. therefore I returned to the beginning of Part Two and began writing it in the third person. I became He, and the distance created by that small shift allowed me to finish the book. Perhaps he (Walker) was suffering from the same problem, I suggested. Perhaps he was too close to his subject. Perhaps the material was too wrenching and personal for him to write about it with the proper objectivity in the first person.”

We start with Walker’s point of view, switch to the more distancing second person, go to third person fragments, and finally diary entrances in which Walker isn’t even present. So, who or what is the book about? If it’s Walker, why is he completely missing from the last part of the book? Is it maybe the way Walker-like attitudes allow people like Born to operate in this world? I think the second quote implies that to some degree, Walker talking about his attraction to born:

“Wary as I might have been, I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fires of my vanity—that invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us. Whatever reservations I had about him, whatever doubts I harbored about his dubious character, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting him to like me, to think that I was something more than a plodding, run-of-the-mill American undergraduate, to see the promise I hoped I had in me but which I doubted nine out of every ten minutes of my waking life.”

Another invisible presence in Walker’s life is his little brother who drowned. We touched on how this affected his relationship with his sister, but how might it have touched on the bigger picture of the novel?

So I think that I agree with Sophie – this book is about layers of invisibility.

For another viewpoint, I suggest the one by Jim Coughenour here:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...
It begins:

"One rainy spring night back in 1987, I wandered into Guild Bookstore (Lincoln Avenue, Chicago, extinct) and was beguiled by a sexy set of hardbacks – The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster – an author I'd never heard of. Guild was known more for its selection of esoteric lectures by Noam Chomksy than for modernist fiction; this set, published by Sun & Moon Press, looked like something I'd expect to find at the Art Institute...."

It is almost as if readers assess Auster as much by his oeuvre as by a single book. He goes on:

"A couple weeks ago I read Auster's newest – Invisible – and fortunately had finished it before I read the evisceration by James Woods in this week's New Yorker. Woods begins his review with a précis of a mock-Auster novel and it's cruelly exact. It may even be fair. But I doubt it will affect my proclivity for Auster, however abused it's become.

"As I read Invisible, I felt as if I was watching an old friend perform his usual set of magic tricks...."

Here is link to The New Yorker review by Woods:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...

Lily, thank you for sharing this review. "The Born Supremacy" was also on my mind, so I am happy that my thoughts were not as shallow as I first thought :-)


I think as any piece of post-modern fiction, it is first and foremost a meta work, meta novel, and meta writing.
If modernist rejected the idea of a plot, post-modernists use the plot as trick, a gimmick, and quite an exciting plot at times it might be. Auster also uses the gimmick of a plot, a mystery story of sorts, but I think he is mostly showing us different variations of the narrative form: past and present tenses, different narrators, different narratives: confession-type stories, bildungsroman,sensational stories, diaries/travelogues,epistolary genre, absurdism with the elements of existential fiction in the final pages of the novel. Slavery, colonialism, and post-colonialism also get their fair share of attention ... and yes, a spy novel aux Graham Greene.

It is as if he is trying to show us that literature itself is the way to create the invisible. Layers after layers of a sacred meaning when that same meaning was never intended or a totally different one is implied, IMHO. Oh, the eternal debate of inference vs. implication. This is one of the reasons why I like post-modern fiction - it is definitely quite often high-brow, but it is also eclectic and surprisingly egalitarian. If it as if authors welcome any reader. A genre reader will get a book he or she wants; a reader prone to analysis will find interesting and intriguing characters, and someone might even enjoy all the literary games with labyrinthine allusions and puns :-)

Zulfiya wrote: "...I think as any piece of post-modern f..."

Enjoyed your comments. Thanks, Zulfiya. (In light of them, I will again encourage reading Auster's Wiki entry, if you haven't already, perhaps especially the section on reputation, but there are comments throughout on his use of literary shenanigans.)

Zulfiya wrote: "...It is as if he is trying to show us that literature itself is the way to create the invisible...."

I agree, great comments. This is the reason the (amazingly well-written) review by Woods confuses me with the assertion that Auster "does nothing with cliché except use it". It seems to me that his simple, and frequently clichéd, writing is an example of Auster's use of the seemingly obvious to cover up the less obvious (or invisible). Is Woods issue that Auster is using cliché without the requisite wink and nod?

Thank you, Lily and Whitney, for your kind words.

I read the Wiki entry about Auster, and I see how some readers could be critical. Honestly, his characters in this novel are not his best accomplishment.

On the other hand, I am slightly taken aback by Woods' criticism. He seems to be unnecessarily harsh. Yes, cliches are not the matter of pride in literature, but only if one is using them to convey the same message or write the same formulaic book over and over again, like numerous genre novels.

Auster, on the other hand, uses cliches to convey very original messages and explore shadowy topics, like in this novel.

I enjoyed the novel and found it quite compelling. I find it a beautiful meditation what literature is about and why authors writing fiction have a poetic license to deal with facts at their own discretion. Literature is fiction, and by definition fiction is fiction, but it does contain the essential truth what human experience is, and an inalienable part of this human life is to write and read stories about ourselves.

Besides, linguists will obligatorily argue, saying that any language is a system of conventions, cliches, and symbols. Without it, we will never be able to understand each other. An apple is only an apple for everybody only when all English speakers agree with the cliched meaning that it is a round fruit of a tree of the rose family.

It was my first Auster novel, but definitely not the last one. The New York Trilogy and The Book of Illusions seem particularly beckoning :-)

In my early twenties, Paul Auster was my favorite author, and The New York Trilogy was my favorite book. I am sad to say, I can barely remember most of his books I read at the time now (close to 20 years ago), even that one. That's more a reflection on me than the books.

When I saw this was a choice this month, I very happily picked it up. Reading it really brought me back, remembering the style of books I used to enjoy so much. But, I have to say, my mind is in a pretzel now.

The book was compelling. I stayed up late wanting to know what was next; I was puzzled by the characters in the best way possible. I agree with others that they were not well developed, but to me, that didn't seem the point. I also had the memory of Auster's past books (what little memory I have) and knew to just go with it and see what there is to get.

I still don't know what I think, honestly. I am so glad to have this group to read everyone else's thoughts in hopes of making some sense of my own. I like things tidy, and here they are clearly not. I guess that was the point. I want to know what is real - did Walker and his sister really have that affair? But they are not real people, there is no "real", so why do I care so much and how am I defining "real"? Is reflecting on this the point?

This is a puzzle I will enjoy meditating on for some time. To provoke that kind of through, in my opinion, makes this a successful book. I am definitely glad I read it.

Allison wrote: "This is a puzzle I will enjoy meditating on for some time"

Unanswered questions are the best in literature, aren't' they? :-)

Allison wrote: "...But they are not real people, there is no "real", so why do I care so much and how am I defining "real"? Is reflecting on this the point?..."

I love your question, Allison. You touch at part of why I was glad to read this novel -- unlike you, I have not read Auster before. But I have been participating in a f2f group for several years now where the theme has become "living the question" -- living into not knowing, but discovering that such can produce a lot of understanding.

I'm having difficulty figuring out why Woods seemed so hard on Auster. Are we encountering some of the rivalry and competitiveness (I don't like to use "jealousy" or "envy") that we may have seen around George Saunders? Or is there a legitimacy to Woods' commentary that expresses concerns I didn't particularly have the necessary literary understanding to share or to see? Or, as a critic, is Woods pushing Auster to go another mile beyond where Auster has so far? All of which makes it delightful to read the insights here -- about the text itself, about literary conventions and theory, about Auster, about the reviews, and in interaction with each other.

Two reviews of Invisible from the British side of the Pond:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009...

"...This is his 13th novel, and at times he seems to be both celebrating and lightly mocking his own oeuvre. There is the oddly detached male narrator roaming New York; a random dramatic incident that alters the course of a life; ruminations on the nature of writing, language and identity; multiple narrators; stories within stories; and general intertextual gadding about..."

"...It is so well paced that it rocket-charges the reader through all its games and structural devices, and is a tantalising page-turner of great – if deceptive – lucidity...."

"...Some of our assumptions come clattering down around us in a strangely satisfying way and, in exposing the mechanics of his storytelling, Auster paradoxically achieves an intensely felt authenticity. This is a fascinating and highly accomplished novel."

By Joanna Briscoe.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009...

Edward Docx of The Observer writes a tough, not particularly flattering review. Still, he opens with:

"Paul Auster is a writer with many skills: a disarming directness of style, a subtle ability to render subtle psychology, a connoisseur's feel for the novel form – its limits and its play – and much besides...."

I absolutely love some of Auster's early books and love his style, which is mostly preserved in this book. Part I was for me an excellent start to a novel. I'm good with gimmicks and everything but all of the subsequent material fell apart for me. With unreliable narrators, you need something to hold the novel together and to me, all of the characters were thin and entirely unreliable, unbelievable, and in the end making me feel as though I don't care. For me, this is not his best, and not very good, mostly because of the placard-like characters.

I really enjoyed this, my first, Austen novel but not at all sure why. The points that Terry, Whitney, Zulfiya, and Sophia make all ring a bell for me, but I don't think they would ever have occurred to me otherwise. Ultimately, I think this is a multi-layered, as Sophia suggests. Those layers, for me, are about more than invisibility. They are also, as Terry notes in the Part IV discussion, about ambiguity.

I would not call the narrators unreliable characters. The bulk of this book is based on people's memories and recollections. Once upon a time, I thought my memory was infallible. But, if it once was, it no longer is!

I really don't know what to make of this novel. Every time I started to see a theme, a metaphor, an idea, it dissipated. At one point, I thought it was about the stories we tell ourselves because we cannot face the truth. But that really doesn't hang together very long. Ambiguity is clearly a theme, but to what purpose? The fact that the story is told through three distinct points of view would seem to be significant, but I cannot figure out why. And the ending is bewildering (not the plot twist, but the radically different setting and the unlikely epilogue of Born's story).

The only thing I really feel like I get is the metafiction--Gwynn's suggestion that he change the names and publish the story anyway. I imagine Paul Auster gets a kick out of us wondering if someone really did tell him that story.

I didn't mind the three seasonal sections to Walker's book, or the shifting narrator. I also didn't mind the total brake-screeching flip to Cecile's point of view. However, that last section did lose some points with me. I was fine with the shift in narrator, even shifting away from the 1967 book (although that kind of made me... sad? No, not sad. I was just sorry to see us stray from Walker's book, but I saw what Auster was doing with it as plot, finishing the Born story with the only person who knew the end of the Born story). But it just felt like it draaaaaged on longer than it needed to. And yet, I don't know what I would cut out. Maybe it was that I felt like we'd invested so much in reading Walker's book, that now that we were reading someone else's work (Cecile's diary), we spent too much time away from Walker's book. That might be it. Whatever it was, it felt like the Cecile/Born story could have been snipped a little.

I wouldn't call the narrators reliable, but I also wouldn't call them any more unreliable than many. We are deliberately left to wonder, but that doesn't make me completely distrust anyone except Born. Walker's story could be that of a fantasist, but it doesn't strike me as necessarily or even probably so.

I also love the meta nod. The book could be a real artifact, in theory.

I never felt the narrators were unreliable. They were relaying what they remembered or believed they remembered. That, for me, creates ambiguity because no two people remember an event the same way. It reminds me of my husband and I giving directions to the same place. We never use the same landmarks because we notice different things, so I might say "turn left at the bookstore," and my husband might say "turn left at the first street after Hardee's."

Linda wrote: "I never felt the narrators were unreliable. They were relaying what they remembered or believed they remembered. That, for me, creates ambiguity because no two people remember an event the same w..."

If two character relay an event differently, then by definition at least one of the narratives is unreliable. An unreliable narrator isn't one who's deliberately lying, just one whose narrative is faulty for one reason or another. You gave a situation where you and your husband have different but both (presumably) accurate ways of giving directions. In Invisible, we have the equivalent of one person saying turn left at the bookstore, and the other saying there isn't a bookstore at all.

That being said, I wouldn't characterize Invisible as a story told by an unreliable narrator, but more a book filled with unreliable narration. Right up to the level of Auster himself and his similarities with at least two of the characters. I like the way the review in the Guardian put it: "Invisible is not so much a tale told by an unreliable narrator as a series of harmonising and clashing testimonies."

Whitney wrote: " I like the way the review in the Guardian put it: "Invisible is not so much a tale told by an unreliable narrator as a series of harmonising and clashing testimonies."

And that to me is memory. Memory is often faulty and this book was about what people remembered. For me, two different remembering does not mean that one is right and one is wrong. If I remember a friend of my parents as kind and pleasant and my sister remembers him as a pervert that only does not make either of us right or wrong, just that our memories are different. We remember many events of our childhood similarly but there are other things that we remember strikingly differently. That doesn't make either of us necessarily unreliable or reliable.

Whitney, you are right about my example of directions - we both give accurate directions not necessarily helpful ones! It was a poor choice of an example.

For me, this book really highlights how memories can differ and whether it is necessary that there even be a "right" or "wrong" version. The narrators agreed on some points and not on others. Were either Walker or Gwen right about the nature of their relationship? Does it matter? Wasn't it the right decision to change all the names and not hurt those not involved? And while we tend to believe the things that harmonized, whose to say those are real? I am always shocked when something I am so sure I remembered correctly is shown not to be so. It is really hard to accept that something you were positive was true isn't.

Of course, this was fiction but these fictional characters and their memories drew me in.

Sidebar quotation from another Auster book:

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”

― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies