specificity

An elderly man crippled by a car accident lies in bed with his granddaughter talking about the past, about his wife, her grandmother, who died a few years before.  He has just told her about how they met and their first romantic encounters.  As he begins to gloss over details and turn to the various places they had lived together, she stops him, saying she doesn’t need general information.  “I want you to tell me about the important things.  What was she like?  How did it feel being married to her?  How well did you get along?  Did you ever fight?  The nuts and bolts, Grandpa, not just a string of superficial facts.”

A string of superficial facts.  Paul Auster confesses here to the greatest weakness of his work of the past decade: his stories are summarized rather than detailed.  Readers want to immerse themselves in the details of a story.  The mechanism for that immersion may be the plot, the characters, the setting, the psychology, the ideas, the language, any of the elements of the form.  But merely outlining the contours of a story will never be enough to satisfy the readerly itch.

There is a story told in Man in the Dark, the recent Auster novel in which this scene occurs, about an alternative Earth, one that diverged with our own after Bush v. Gore in 2000, with New York leading a secession from the Union and America going to war to return the wayward states to the fold.  The story, whose main power comes from this scenario, comprises most of the story and, according to reviewers, is the story at the heart of this novel.  But that isn’t true.  The story of the war between the American states is ended abruptly and abandoned in the second half of this book to be replaced by the reminiscences about the dead wife of August Brill, who had been telling himself the story of that civil war to avoid thinking about the past.

The story at the heart of Man in the Dark is Brill’s story, and to a lesser extent, that of his granddaughter, who blames herself for the death of her ex-boyfriend, who was decapitated in Iraq while serving as a contractor driving supplies.  Brill and his granddaughter, Katya, are not simply in mourning for those they have lost but are seriously traumatized by the boyfriend’s vicious and gruesome death, which they witnessed in an online video.  They have spent months trying to drown the image of that death with other beautiful images by watching the finest movies ever made.  One of the best sections of the book are discussions of some of their recent viewings—Tokyo Story, The World of Apu, Grand Illusion, and The Bicycle Thief—and what makes them so beautiful and meaningful.  But this story of trauma and recovery and the meaning of story in our lives isn’t given the same texture, isn’t revealed through detail as the alternative America was, and it suffers from that lack.  That is why so many reviewers claimed the novel was about that other America rather than about the people suffering so much they would tell themselves such a story.

Auster, clearly, recognizes this, knows that contrasting a detailed peripheral story with a sketched central story will put the central story in a bad light.  So why would he purposely undermine his story?  Auster gives us a two-part answer.  The first comes near the end, when Brill considers another memory, “an image from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.  The real and the imagined are one.  Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things.”  Stories, then, are important, just as important as real life.  But this doesn’t say anything about stories well-told rather than briefly discussed.  This part of the answer comes from that earlier discussion of the great films, when Katya offers this theory of greatness: “Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions.  That’s the language of film.”  Again, Auster points us not toward abstraction but toward specificity as the necessary ingredients of greatness, and greatness in terms of emotional truth, of meaning in art.