I referenced this book in my prior entry and decided not burden an already long entry with a review. Now that I’ve sat down with this lovely slender book in hand, this is not a formal “review” but, instead, an impression, and how it relates to my own life.
Thankfully, I have not experienced a loss of a spouse, the main theme hanging over the protagonist, Sy Baumgartner who lost his wife, Anna to a drowning accident, after 40 loving years of being together. She becomes almost a ghost which follows his next ten years. It is a skillful memory novel, the author stepping into the past and then back to the present, and as a metafictional piece, into the process of writing, even giving Anna a voice from her poems and essays, and frequently blending Baumgartner the protagonist with the author, Auster. There are so many tributaries he sets sails on, including his most personal one; a trip to Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine in 2017 which Auster had written about before and now reiterates as Baumgartner’s journey to find traces of his grandfather and his Jewish roots, but they are all skillfully connected.
Three important characters fall into his life, Ed Papadopoulos, a seemingly ungainly new employee of the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, but a man with a heart of gold, and watch how he comes back into Sy’s life later in the novel. Judith, the first woman he allows himself to love after dealing with such a prolonged bereavement, and, finally a young scholar, Beatrix Coen, who has discovered Anna’s work, wants to write her doctorate thesis on the thinly published poems, as well as her unpublished works and essays. This gives Sy (and thus Auster) a reason for the next chapter in the book, one which is not there. The book ends abruptly. I have my ideas where that goes; yours may be different. I think Auster carefully thought through the unusual conclusion. As with his own his life, abrupt endings can be expected but not easily anticipated.
I said that there were also connections to my own life noted in my review of his novel, Brooklyn Follies. There the main character (Auster as well) lived in Park Slope, as I did earlier in my life.
In Baumgartner his early adult years, where he connected with Anna, were on 85th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam on NYC’s upper West Side, Mine were on the same street just off Columbus when I connected with my own wife-to-be, Ann. Auster and I apparently missed each other by a year. He doesn’t go into the detail about the UWS as he does about Park Slope in Brooklyn Follies, but the coincidence was a little eerie.
More significant, to me, the book serves as a wake-up call to finish my memoir, not that the story of my life or writing can compare to Auster’s, but we all share mortality and I think his later works reflect an acceptance of this reality. When he (Baumgartner – now a retired philosophy professor -- and no doubt, Auster, who died only last April) has an epiphany about time running out, and the need to tie things together, Baumgartner thinks about a book he has not yet completed, interestingly entitled Mysteries of the Wheel. He is seventy one while having this thought, daydreaming in his backyard, living in Princeton, now, about deceased friends, increasing memory lapses. His writing is exquisite, greatly introspective and stream of consciousness, moving from amusing anecdotes to profundity, and he might as well personally be relating a cautionary tale to me:
Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retriever book from the living room, and to pour yourself a glass of juice of the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book, but not the juice, or the juice, but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress, or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often, that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’ve gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. But the term is Dementia, but one way or another Baumgartner knows, and even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good. Good that Mysteries of the Wheel is coming along and good that he has stopped work early today and is sitting in the backyard on this magnificent afternoon, letting his thoughts drift wherever they want to go, and with all the circling around the business of short term memory, he is beginning to think about long-term memory as well, and with that word, long, images from the distant past star flickering in a remote corner of his mind, and suddenly he feels an urge to start foraging around in the thickets and underbrush of that place to see what he might discover there. So rather than go on looking at the white clouds and the blue sky and the green grass, Baumgartner shuts his eyes leans back in his chair, tilts his face toward the sun, and tells himself to relax. The world is a red flame burning on the surface of his eyelids. He goes on breathing in and out, in and out, inhaling the air through his nostrils, exhale through his partially open lips and then, after 20 or 30 seconds, he tells himself to remember.
And so I try “to remember” writing what is tentatively entitled “Explaining It To Me.” It is a race with time to finish and publish it so it may accompany the ones I’ve already published, Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense, my 2019 book dealing with my times’ social, political, and economic breakdowns, and Explaining It to Someone: Learning From the Arts, published in 2020, a collection of hundreds of my theatre and book reviews, which might suggest some answers from our writers and playwrights. “Explaining It To Me” will be personal and therefore even more challenging to write and finish. Maybe I can complete and publish it next year if there is enough time to “forage around in the thickets and underbrush.” I have a first draft but it needs much more work and there are so many appointments to keep.
