When device goes wrong
The cover was pretty awesome, but unfortunately the book wasn't.
I’m reading a Paul Auster book right now, one I picked up from the bookstore maybe a year ago, and since I have the bad (good?) habit of buying more books than I can read, I only just got around to it. I enjoyed The New York Trilogy when I read it for class in undergrad and wanted to branch out with Auster’s writing, so I started Travels in the Scriptorium two days ago; it’s been on my shelf of potential thesis books for a while and I wanted something new before retackling Morrison’s Beloved. It seemed like the perfect fit of something different.
I have maybe thirty pages to go, but I’m not moving so quickly through this book (which is, in fact, rather short, coming in at under two hundred pages) because I enjoy it but rather because I want it to be over; I’ve had the urge to throw it across the room more than once and believe me when I say I’m not the type to mistreat a book no matter what.
The main thing bothering me about the book is, in short, one long string of devices. Here are some of the things I didn’t like.
- the main character is being watched through secret cameras, and even though we have insight to his mind, the book frequently pulls the reader back to this concept, creating distance
- the main character is called Mr. Blank and many (all?) of the other characters are from previous novels of Auster’s
- the narrative features a book within a book as Mr. Blank spends a large chunk of the novel reading and discussing a manuscript (I liked this sort of frame in Cloud Atlas but here I found it mostly boring)
- character motivation seems contrived to fit plot, such as Mr. Blank’s desire to find out if the door to his room is locked, but at least so far he hasn’t bothered to find out
- Auster seems obsessed with juvenile and bathroom humor, where Mr. Blank farts, pees his pants, vomits, gropes a woman’s breasts, ejaculates, and his penis is as developed of a character as anyone (unless perhaps you’ve read some of the other novels), and none of the above seems to have much bearing on the story
Now, true, not all of the above comes from device, but when I try to strip away the device from the book, all that seems to be left is bullet point five. Device should enhance work, not serve as the main scaffolding to hold up everything else. I’ve read many books that do this, at least in my mind, successfully: Cloud Atlas, The Zero, Lolita, and many, many others. These books seem to have originated somewhere other than their various devices (I could see Cloud Atlas growing out of the device, I guess, but the final product is so fantastic that I forgive this), and it is this that makes them successful; Auster’s book seems like little more than a wink to his fans, and as a result the story feels secondary.
I think the name Mr. Blank alone would make me throw the book across the room.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Willow Springs. Willow Springs said: how much device can one work of fiction hold? paul auster tries to find out. http://bit.ly/azkrTa [...]
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