Customer Reviews

Man in the Dark A Novel

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Quite a few of Auster's novels have a surreal quality. Man in the Dark does too. In this case, it's an almost science fictional scenario - an alternate America where civil war has broken out and the United States has become the Disunited States.

This imagined world exists only in the mind of August Brill, an elderly man (in the real world) lying in bed recovering from an accident that has left him immobile. There's an interesting recursive aspect to the alternate America scenario (which I won't elaborate on here for fear of giving away the plot) that adds a further surreal dimension to the story. Brill's imaginary excursions into this parallel world are interspersed with comparatively mundane real world scenes that begin to paint a picture of his views, his life and his family.

The parallel reality aspect of the story ends about two thirds of the way through the book, which is a shame because I found the whole concept quite fascinating and very entertaining. Most of the rest of the book consists of a discussion between Brill and his granddaughter Katya in which Brill recounts the story of his marriage and Katya grapples with guilt over the death in Iraq of her former boyfriend who was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists.

For me, America's military involvement in Iraq is the major theme of the book. In Brill's alternate reality, the Twin Towers remain standing and America does not go to war in Iraq. Instead, it self-destructs. In the real world, American soldiers die fighting and others (like Katya's boyfriend) die simply because they're Americans in the wrong place at the wrong time. The implication seems to be that America's interventionist foreign policy is an alternative to the complete breakdown of national unity; that war somehow holds the nation together, albeit tenuously. I don't think Auster is advocating the policy, but rather asking whether it's really worth it even if the alternative is confronting some pretty unpleasant realities at home.

Man in the Dark is Auster's most political book to date, but it's not ponderous or sanctimonious. It's fundamentally a story about a man and his family. The politics kind of lurks in the background. It's a book that needs to be read more than once, I think (and it's short enough for that not to be a burden). I enjoyed it a lot. It's provocative and imaginative, as good literature should be.

First, I've read every non-poetry book Paul Auster's written, and I admire many of his books. However, the last few novels (from Timbuktu through Travels in the Scriptorium) have slipped in quality and depth and originality. Man in the Dark is a slight improvement, in terms of originality, but lacks any real depth, and at times is as cloying and sentimental - and downright cheesy - as a romance novel. A middle-aged novelist with as much experience as Auster should be at the top of his game, should be a fount of profundity, but sadly he hasn't had any fresh ideas since Leviathan. Complaining about the political state of America, however well you mask it in fiction, is not profound, it's what makes the news - print and TV - unwatchable; it's as easy as breathing when you are asleep.

Man in the Dark centers on August Brill, a 72-year-old ex-critic who has a shattered leg, from a car accident, and a shattered life, from, well, living life. He's recovering in the Vermont home of his daughter and granddaugher who themselves are both suffering from emotional downturns. To get through the painful, insomniac nights, Brill imagines a fictional storyline in which the protagonist, Owen Brick (such an Auster name), is torn from his life in Queens to an alternate history of America where the so-called Blue States are at war with the so-called Red states, a war that began after the 2000 election; and in this world the Twin Towers where never attacked. Foolish? Of course. However, this alter-fiction provides most of the intrigue and the best writing in the book (I won't spoil the plot), but it's cut off abruptly, right when it would have gotten very interesting, at a point when a writer like Borges (to whom Auster is much in debt here) would take it to a new level. But during the daylight hours Brill spends his time watching old movies with his granddaughter and getting sentimental about his past, and it's like reading a script from a Hallmark Sunday Night movie ... "Was grandma pretty?", etc. ... You get the picture. And to make it worse these dialogues (Auster's never had this much dialogue in one of his novels) are written in an almost ossified prose.

The novel is, thankfully, short, and I read it in two sittings; and I felt nothing but disappointment when I finished.

I hope the old Paul Auster - the Auster of Moon Palace, the NY3 and the Music of Chance - returns next time; he is sorely missed by this reader.

August Brill, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic, now a depressed widower confined to a wheelchair, spends much of each night lying awake, thinking about his life and creating stories to keep himself amused. Living with his divorced daughter Miriam and his granddaughter Katya in Brattleboro, Vermont, August has made no progress at all writing his book, a memoir he hopes to leave to posterity. Instead he watches films with his granddaughter, analyzing how filmmakers use objects as symbols to convey human emotions.

Each person in the novel is "in the dark," searching for identity and the meaning of life and love, but each is also trying to reconcile his/her present life with the accidents of his own history. The death of August's wife, and his own accident, have left him dependent on Miriam. Miriam's abandonment by her husband has left her vulnerable and responsible for the household, and Katya, his granddaughter, is almost paralyzed from the death of her lover, feeling that she did not love him enough. All feel like failures.

This absurdist novel gains excitement--and its main plot--each night when August, sleepless, invents characters living different kinds of lives in an alternative reality--one so close to our own reality that its plausibility becomes frightening. In his stories, August has flashed back to the year 2000, in which the Presidential election led to riots and the demand to abolish the Electoral College. Eventually New York, New England, and nine states in the Midwest, seceded, precipitating the Second Civil War, against President George Bush and the Federals.

The novel opens with Owen Brick, a young man dressed in fatigues, trapped in a deep hole, unable to escape. He has no idea where he is or how he got there, but he cannot avoid his mission to assassinate the creator of the war--August Brill, who also created him. As the novel switches from present reality into the alternative reality and back, the author makes thoughtful observations about writing and its ability to create realities, but on the plot level (which ends after 2/3 of the book), it is also suspenseful, exciting, and a great deal of fun. Sly humor peeks through much of the alternative reality plot line, and the ironic twists on several levels keep the reader entertained. The characters grow as they share their family histories, and as the Second Civil War rages in one reality, the real characters, like Brill and his friends, remember the very real horrors of the Second World War and Iraq. Intense and clever, Auster's novel examines important issues of war, reality, and identity in fewer than two hundred pages. n Mary Whipple

The New York Trilogy (Green Integer)
The Invention of Solitude
The Book of Illusions: A Novel
Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge

Paul Auster is one of the most oddly fascinating American authors of the past twenty years or so. His The New York Trilogy is considered by many to be a modern classic. Novels such as The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies have been considerable bestsellers.

For me, his best work is often found in the quieter books. The ones that slip under the radar without attracting too much fuss. The Music of Chance and Leviathan are exceptional, exquisite novels. If you have never read any Auster then I would suggest you start with NYT but you should quickly move on to Chance or Leviathan. They are marvelous.

Whatever you do, don't begin your Auster acquaintance with Man in the Dark. It is not that it is a bad novel, more an unfinished one. Or, to be more precise, two unfinished books stitched together.

In recent years Auster has been doing what Milan Kundera has grown increasingly fond of, namely writing sketches of novels, ideas of novels and presenting them as complete. This doesn't mean they aren't a good read - I enjoyed an in the Dark quite a lot - but they are a bit vague and unsatisfying.

August Brill is an elderly book critic. He shares his house with his daughter and granddaughter. All three are missing their significant others, for differing reasons, and a sense of loss and sadness pervades their lives. August can't sleep, and to pass the long nights he makes up the story of a young man who awakes to find himself in an alternative America, an America at war. This fictional character created by another fictional character wanders through a suitably Kafka-esque wasteland trying to work out where on earth he is and how to survive. This invented tale becomes part of the book's narrative, the two story strands weaving together reasonably effectively.

The fiction within the fiction is the more entertaining of the two stories so the author drops a huge clanger when he abruptly kills of this strand to concentrate on the solemn mood piece set in the 'real world'. It is a significant error, effectively revealing the join between what ultimately can only be viewed as two separate novels coveniently stitched together.

It is a shame as there is a great deal to enjoy in Man in the Dark, even if it doesn't quite make the grade. One for Auster completists only I would suggest.

"Man in the Night" is a multi-faceted dark tale that may well be easier to read than listen to.

Wheelchair bound August Brill is recovering from an auto crash with his daughter Miriam and granddaughter Katya in Vermont. Haunted by the crash, he cannot sleep and tells himself stories into the night. He's a retired film critic who should be writing his own novel, but cannot find the inspiration. The plight of a wheelchair bound man alone in the dark is heartrending.

Brill tells the story of Owen Brick, a soldier-assassin in the second US Civil War. In this alternate history, after the 2000 election the State of New York led the secession from the Union. Brick is detailed to assassinate the man who has invented the war, apparently a recluse who has invented the war by writing it. The reluctant soldier Brick is drawn through a world gone mad.

Brill also tells the stories of his granddaughter, Katya, who is recovering from the tragic murder of the man she loves, and Miriam, the daughter, who is writing a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne's family. Brill's narrative segues into both film critiques and novel synopses.

The story tried my patience as a listener. This is not an audiobook you can put on and go about your workday with the usual interruptions. The story shifts so rapidly you are going to get lost and have to repeat more than once. Portions of the story--for example, Brill's recounting of Katya's response to the film "The Bicycle Thief" were somewhat long and tedious. Ultimately, "Man in the Dark" was worth the listen, but I had to clear the decks of anything else to do so.

Rebecca Kyle, September 2008

Loneliness takes many forms. For some it is a feeling of intense isolation even in a crowd or a room full of friends. If it is dark, nighttime, one may feel almost disabled by desolation. You truly are alone save for your thoughts, memories, unanswered questions that prevent sleep and only summon remorse. That is the condition in which August Brill finds himself in Paul Auster's brilliantly challenging latest novel "Man In The Dark."

At 72 years of age Brill finds himself in his daughter's Vermont home where he is trying to recover from an automobile accident. Sleep eludes him as he recalls past tragedies - the death of his wife, the desertion of his daughter's husband, the death in Iraq of Titus, his granddaughter's fiancé. A retired book critic Brill has a fertile imagination, and sees in his mind's eye quite a different America, and it is a haunting scene - a place where there has not been a terrorist attack, our country is not at war save for within itself when New York and 16 other states secede from the Union.

He flagellates himself for these thoughts, saying, "Why am I doing this? Why do I persist in traveling down these old, tired paths; why this compulsion to pick at old wounds and make myself bleed again?"

Auster, as is his wont, challenges us to consider the world in which we live. He underscores the atrocities of war by relating the horrible death of Titus that is posted on the Internet and seen by Brill and his granddaughter.

Brilliant, shocking? Yes. It is also unforgettable, undeniably the work of one of the most creative minds of our generation.

August Brill, age 72, lives with his daughter and granddaughter. Brill is a temporary invalid, having crushed his leg in a car accident. Brill recently lost his wife; his daughter's husband left her; his granddaughter's boyfriend was recently murdered. Brill and his granddaughter spend their days watching Netflix movies (she's a film student); Brill spends his sleepless nights inventing stories. The story he invents during the course of the novel centers on a man who has been abducted from his life, transplanted to an alternative Earth where 9/11 never happened, where a civil war is claiming millions of lives. The civil war is happening because a writer (Brill) is writing about it; the abducted man is tasked with killing Brill.

As one would expect from a Paul Auster novel, Man in the Dark is elegantly written. Like most of Auster's characters, Brill is isolated, and not only (or primarily) because of his limited mobility is limited by a recent traffic accident. He has difficulty connecting with both his daughter and granddaughter; the reader suspects he had the same problem with his wife before her death. The main characters are all working their way through pain. The story Brill creates to combat his insomnia is telling: Brill seems to want to cast himself as the abducted man (relatively young, happily married) who is charged with killing the old, destructive man Brill imagines himself to have become. Ultimately he confides something of his life to his granddaughter, who is also unable to sleep, and by doing so perhaps starts coming to terms with the person he has become.

All of this is heavy stuff and yet, at the end, I was left with an "is that all there is?" feeling. I was hoping for a bit more substance to emerge from this thin novel. Still, I found it worth reading just for the enjoyment of Auster's prose: the writing is sharp and poignant. For that I gave it 4 stars, although I would probably give it 3 1/2 if I could.

Seventy-two-year-old, ex-writer August Brill lies awake during the night, a victim of insomnia. He entertains himself by telling himself stories. He lives with his daughter and granddaughter in Vermont, his wife has recently passed away and he had a leg damaged in an auto accident. He seems depressed, who could blame him.

One of the stories he's been telling himself is of a parallel world and he takes us right into it, makes us believe it's real, maybe it is. In this story we see Owen Brick, who went to bed with his wife, but wakes in a hole in another world. America is at war, millions are being killed and Owen has been selected to go back into his world and kill Brill, because the thinker of the story has actually created it in this parallel world.

But Brick's not a killer and therein lies the problem. If he does not kill Brill, then Government guys from the parallel world are going to come through and kill him and his wife. Brick's got a problem, but you won't have one if you read this engaging story. There was one jarring surprise that almost ruined the book for me, but I kept on and read on till the end and I'm glad I did.

This is a short and strange story. It'll make you think. It'll make you wonder about those stories you might tell yourself before you fall asleep. This is a good read, I liked it more than I can say.

The master of obsessive characters and multi-layered, internalized worlds takes on the themes of aging, family dynamics, parallel realities and the psychic wounds inflicted by religious fanatics in a post 9/11 US.

Stories within stories and fiction within fiction, "Man in the Dark" is oddly structured and oddly gripping.

Maybe "mesmerizing" would be a better word. But when it was over, I didn't know what I had in my head, my heart or my hand. It's hard to get your hands around a story about a book critic who is killing an uncomfortable night by telling himself a long story about a parallel universe--and neither the "real" book critic yarn or the story in the book critic's mind are fully resolved. To mix things up further, the book critic, August Brill, devotes time deconstructing, analyzing and appreciating classic films he's watching on television at home. For example, there's a long and interesting rehash of the dishes and other inanimate objects in "The Grand Illusion." If that's enough story, Brill is a retired book critic for The Boston Globe. Think he's read enough "standard" fiction that the last thing he wants is a normal, traditional, predictable ending? Perhaps.

It's the speculative story I enjoyed the most, a tale of a soldier named Owen Brick, wakes up to find himself stuck deep in a hole. After he's rescued, Brick slowly uncovers the fact that he's living in an alternate world where he has a mission with his name on it. The exchange with Sarge Serge has a "Catch 22" vibe to it as the Sarge gives Brill his orders to assassinate Brill, the author of the story. "He invented it, and everything that happened or is about to happen is in his head. Eliminate that head, and the war stops. It's that simple." Brick replies that Sarge Serge makes it sound like the man is writing a story "and we're all part of it." Sarge Serge replies: "Something like that." And then, asks Brick, if he's killed what happens to us? Sarge Serge reassures Brick that everything will go back to "normal" but Brick quickly concludes that maybe they would all just disappear."

This story has a surreal, Twilight Zone sensibility to it. The political backdrop for this story is that the United States has been in the throes of a civil war and that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon never happened. Owen Brick's journeys are told neatly and with adrenaline. The scenes in the coffee

The last stretch of the book is August Brill and his granddaughter Katya recounting family history. There's a rich and interesting passage with Brill relaying his courtship of Katya's grandmother and his missteps along the way with his marriage.

Throughout, there is an edge and a brooding mysterious quality to the stories as they ebb and flow--or as they snap to a close (disappear).

I enjoyed the pieces and sharp writing made it easy to stick with, but I'm not sure what the sum total equals or what it means.

Maybe Owen Brick's waitress holds the clue when Brick orders some food in the city where he's gone on his mission. He wants bacon, sausage, toast or potatoes with his eggs. But his waitress sets him straight in this new world:

Dream on, honey, she says. Eggs are eggs. Not eggs with something else. Just eggs.

Maybe stores are just stories. Not stories with something else. Just stories.