David Zimmer’s life collapses when his two sons and his wife die in a plane crash. He finds, if not meaning, then at least something to do, by writing a book about the silent films of forgotten star, Hector Mann. Hector Mann disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s, and is presumed long dead, but now in the 1980s Zimmer gets a letter from his wife, saying that Mann is alive but ailing  in New Mexico and would like to meet Zimmer before he dies.

I first read this book four years ago, and didn’t enjoy it as much as this time. I thought it was too derivative of his other work then, but now I think it’s brilliant with subtle intertextuality.

David Zimmer was Marco Stanley Fogg’s friend in my favourite Auster book, Moon Palace. I would like more than anything to read the continuing adventures of Fogg. This will have to do for now. One tantalising reference to the events of that book is the fact that Zimmer named one of his sons ‘Marco’. No more is said than this, but it put a smile on my face.

The rest of the intertextuality is only now being revealed. Auster published this novel in 2002, but it contains references to works he has completed since. [Spoiler alert] In New Mexico, Mann has spent years making films no-one else is allowed to see, films which his wife will destroy on his death. One of them has the title Travels in the Scriptorium; another, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The first, of course, is the title of Auster’s 2007 novel; the second of the film he released this year.

Zimmer gives us a scene by scene breakdown of The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the only secret film of Mann’s he gets to see before they are destroyed. I’ll find it interesting to compare with the ‘real’ film of that name.

The threat of the destruction of these amazing secret films makes the whole novel feels like a tragedy at times. Auster reveals something in me, because I managed to feel like the novel had a happy ending when the films might be saved at the end, even after the sad death of Alma, Freida, Hector and possibly David.

9/10

This panel had Paul Auster, John Kinsella (my PEAC teacher’s cousin!), Margo Lanagan and Matt Rubenstein.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked  Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology - ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ - but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing - clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ’swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

I did not have a coffee with Paul Auster. I did not shake hands with Paul Auster. I didn’t even really have a conversation with him. But I went to Adelaide and heard him speak (I was just out of the tent in the sun and he was very small but distinguishable) and he was wise, cynical yet generous, amusing and weathered, just as I imagined and hoped for.

And I did exchange a few words with him.

I was waiting in the autograph line wondering what I could say to a man who I had spent so many hours with and who had been so important to me. In the end the exchange went like this:

NH: ‘You’re my favourite writer, Mr Auster - it’s an honour to hear you speak.’

PA: ‘Well thank you. Thank you reading for my books.’

(Paul Auster indecipherably scribbles in my battered copy of Moon Palace.)

NH: ‘In my new novel one of the characters reads Moon Palace.’

PA (looking surprised): ‘Really? Well thank you.’

What happened then? Did he move onto the next person or did I walk away, spoiling a promising opening because there were a thousand people behind me waiting in the hot sun? I don’t know.

The reality is that you can’t hope to know a writer in ‘real life’ with any of the intimacy or depth that you know him or her through their books. It’s just not possible. It’s the wonder of reading and writing. Auster even said something to this effect at some stage, or I think he did.

There was a time when I would have thought of a witty or controversial or brilliant question to ask and I would have asked it, and I would have waited by the tent for hours, and I would have pushed my way into talking to Auster. But I’m 27 now, as of yesterday, and I’m old and shy. I’m mistrustful of people who push their way forward and I’m sick of egos.

I was glad I went, because I had to and because I enjoyed it, and yet it was in an important sense exactly as I feared.

I’m re-reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement ahead of the release of the film on Boxing Day. It’s an exquisite treat. Each sentence is so well constructed, so revealing of some truth of experience, that I feel guilty reading it quickly. It’s like an extremely expensive meal that can’t even be replicated if you had the money: there are only a couple of books this good in the whole world and you can only read them so many times.

McEwan, my second favourite writer, and Auster, my first favourite writer, will both be speaking at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. And I won’t be there. Like a fool, I hesitated, scared to ask for time off work when I was just starting a new job, and the event is sold out. It feels like a dream that first they could be speaking at the same event in the same country as me and second that I missed out.

I wonder if my problem’s with the translation. I won’t ever know, because I never intend to learn Spanish.I like the themes of lost books, secret libraries and adolescence.  I love this mysterious figure of an obscure failed novelist named Julian Carax, whom a handful of fans obsessively seek. The book  feels like it belongs to the same family as some of my favourite books - Paul Auster’s Moon Palace, Nicholas Christopher’s A Trip to the Stars.

Nicholson the cult writer

Briton Geoff Nicholson is another very underrated writer - at least here in Australia, where it is rare to find his novels in bookshops or libraries.

His preoccupation is a rewriting of urban mythologies and obsessions - lunatic asylums, modern cannibalism, secret clubs, collectors, cult writers, Volkswagons. He chooses a subject like this and then assembles a plot around it, often complete with fascinating asides on the subject’s place in popular culture.

His writing is perceptive and literary, and yet the plot-drivenness makes his work feel more like popular fiction at times. He is perhaps most easily classififed as a cult writer. (Somewhere he has a great definition of a cult writer - something about it meaning you barely sell any copies but someone in a backwater town of the mid-west thinks you’re the ants-pants.)

The Food Chain’s subjects are gluttony and secret clubs. Thus we have cannibalism in London and a chef at a fine restaurant ejaculating in the food, all in the course of a fast pace plot and a novel of just 180 pages.

Plot

Virgil Marcel arrives in London at the invitation of the Everlasting Club, an underground gentleman’s club which has been feasting around the clock gluttonously for three hundred and fifty years. He is kidnapped by a nude model in their employ, who takes him on a tour of British cuisine and kinky sex.

Meanwhile, Virgil’s father Frank suspects his wife is up to something.  Frank is the owner of a chain of successful Golden Boy restaurants, mediocore but reliable family restaurants. The ‘bolden boy’ is a fibreglass statue of Virgil as a young boy that graces the top of each restaurant. He opened a fine food restaurant which failed until Virgil turned it nasty and thus fashionable.

Assessment

I suspect Nicholson plots his novels very tightly, and somehow I think this is the cause of my dissatisfaction… it moves too quickly and mechanically.

But I couldn’t put it down, maybe because of that plot drive. I also love the way he weaves popular culture and urban myth into his novels, and I think he has genuine insight into what it’s like to be alive. 

He’s always entertaining, even when his novels have that unfinished feel like those of Philip K. Dick. Recommended for fans of Dick, Paul Auster, and the Coen Brothers.

7/10

The perfect book?

The first time I read it in 2001, every word seemed perfect. A beautiful parable without a word out of place. This time, it wasn’t perfect; some sentences jarred, the novel didn’t absorb me to the same degree.

I think a novel can only ever be perfect for a particular time and place. For one reading only.  And yet with this said, I still loved this novel.

Plot and commentary 

Compared to most novels, the plot is easy to remember; maybe this is why the term ‘parable’ seems appropriate. Here’s the plot with commentary (you might want to look away):

Jim Nashe comes into an inheritance just after his wife leaves him. He leaves his job as a firefighter and starts driving across America in a new car. He loves the freedom, encapsulated in the car with classical music at full volume.

But the money begins to run out when he picks up a hitch-hiker, a plucky young man named Jack Pozzi. Pozzi is a professional poker player, and he has a game the next night at the house of two eccentric millionaires who aren’t very good at cards. It should be easy money, and Nashe puts up his last $10 000 on a whim.

The millionaires are Flower and Stone, and they came into their money through a lottery win. I noticed for the first time the obvious parallelism - Flower and Stone forced into partnership because of good luck and, after they lose the money and then the car and then go into debt, Pozzi and Nashe forced into partnership because of bad luck.

Back up a moment. Stone has built a miniature city. It is a place of both whimsy and menace. Everything looks nostalgic, a little boy is eating an icecream on the street, but in the prison a prisoner is being executed by firing squad. There is a menacing justice in the miniature city.

(Nashe leaves the card room to look at the city; he picks out the tiny figures of Stone and Flower and keeps them. Later, Pozzi pinpoints this as the point when he started to lose. When Nashe smashed up the instruments of reality. Nashe responds by burning the two models. After this, things get worse.)

Flower and Stone extend the mixture of whimsy and menace to Nashe and Pozzi. To pay off their debt, they have to build a stone wall. The stones are the ruins of a castle the millionaires have transported from Europe. The menace comes when their supervisor begins to wear a gun and when they realise there is no way out - a huge fence blocks their way.

I’ve been thinking of Pozzi and Nashe building that wall. It’s a comforting image when I’m not enjoying work. (Which is quite a lot lately.)
 

The endings 

I find it fascinating that Auster has released into the world two official versions of the ending. In the book version, the story ends with Nashe driving into an oncoming truck when he is given a chance to drive his car again in celebration of finishing. There is little doubt that he is about to die.

In the film version, he survives the crash and is picked up the next morning by a passing driver (played by Paul Auster). It echoes strongly with Nashe picking up a badly bruised Pozzi earlier in the novel.

This book ran me over with its restrained intensity, its insight, and its near-perfect execution. Here are my splattered thoughts from 2005 when I read it.

She is married to my favourite author, Paul Auster, and yet until now I have not read her. I may have to admit she is as good as him, or better. I wonder if they get insecure.

Indeed, it’s got the same themes as some of Auster’s work - two artistic couples pulling against each other, the love and friendship and lust, and (sometime) infidelities [a common source?] - and I’m thinking here particularly of Auster’s work in Leviathan, a companion novel in so many ways.

In fact, if Auster had put his name to What I Loved, I would have accepted without question that he’d written it.

But the book, her not him; indeed, I meet more people who have read her than him, and I may be jealous.

I wanted to write about the ironic couplings: she writes about Leo writing about Bill who has painted a picture of Violet which he calls ‘Self Portrait’. Leo/Siri comments how the title gets us thinking about the nature of selfhood, and how a portrait of another person of another gender could possibly be a self portrait. We the readers can add another level - how can Siri write so convincingly and reveal so much of her soul through the eyes of a male art critic (Leo) writing of his friendship with a male painter (Bill)?

I like the scope of the book; it isn’t a simple narrative, it has the breadth and complexity of life. It is twenty five years in the lives of the two couples, which are really two and a half couples, since Violet displaces Lucille, and then really it’s about their sons anyway, Matthew and Mark (I was expecting Luke and John, but the pun was only superficial, or only co-incidental.)

And the last section made the novel feel like a Brett Easton Ellis novel told from the pov of one of the sane characters. There is the same shifting identities, extremities of violence, sex and drugs. The same world, it seemed to me. Only in New York do these things happen, you see.

And it got me wondering as to whether Siri and Paul know Brett, and what they think of his work. Because they might hate it, or they might like it.

The crazed ‘artist’, Teddy Giles, and his favourite movie Psycholand (about a psychopath who goes from state to state in his private plane murdering a person in each city) made me think of him, wonder whether there was some injoke in operation here.

And the other novel it made me think of, just to complete a parallel literary couple, is Donna Tartt’s Secret History. There is the same sense of a middle class descent into the dark side, into madness. There is the same concern for art, life, meaning.

The title bears more thinking about. It is explained by Violet at the end where she asks what it is that she loved. Was it Mark or the idea of Mark? I feel like I haven’t understood Siri properly here. But the title sounds elegaic, sounds like the book feels, this beautiful remembrance of things past.

Once I got into this book - which did take ninety pages, but that had more to do with me than it - I found it compulsive, un-putt-downable. I cared and wondered about the fate of the characters - even the minor ones.

It should be made into a film, and by a great director. I think Sofia Coppola.