He writes:
One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.” There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist.
In Wood's view this is only one of Auster's many sins: the books are entertaining. The larger truth is that Auster's writing is not ham-fistedly "postmodern," but are written by narrators who are speaking through journals or sharing bar stories. His stories are always naturalistic right up to the Rod Serling-esque moment when we start to suspect that things are not quite right.
It is a shift from the dialectical to the rhetorical, from the awkwardness of the rational and the commonplace to the dreamlike and intuitive. What interests Auster is how everyday experiences can seem surreal if one is in grief, if one is isolated, if one is a tortured and alienated existentialist, or at least inclined to that world view. What he's not interested in, necessarily, is language games and the knocking down of old cliches and pulpy genres.
In truth I think he enjoys them, and he makes use of them in interesting and unexpected ways. Not as critique or parody them but as an entry way to the poetic dream state where he can examine his real interest which is subjectivity and the individual self. How it is constructed? How does it fail the truth? How does it bend and reshape our experience, and why do we return to it nevertheless as though our reality was in fact "reality"?
Each novel is an examination of the basic problem of existence. We are here whether we like it or not; so how should we spend our time? Art and life are the tangled outcome.
It is a shift from the dialectical to the rhetorical, from the awkwardness of the rational and the commonplace to the dreamlike and intuitive. What interests Auster is how everyday experiences can seem surreal if one is in grief, if one is isolated, if one is a tortured and alienated existentialist, or at least inclined to that world view. What he's not interested in, necessarily, is language games and the knocking down of old cliches and pulpy genres.
In truth I think he enjoys them, and he makes use of them in interesting and unexpected ways. Not as critique or parody them but as an entry way to the poetic dream state where he can examine his real interest which is subjectivity and the individual self. How it is constructed? How does it fail the truth? How does it bend and reshape our experience, and why do we return to it nevertheless as though our reality was in fact "reality"?
Each novel is an examination of the basic problem of existence. We are here whether we like it or not; so how should we spend our time? Art and life are the tangled outcome.
