Paul Auster's Man in the Dark comes highly acclaimed and rightfully so. This is a short novel that is anything but sweet as Auster rakes us through the mud of a post-apocalyptic America that is much more present than we would like to admit.
There are several stories in Man in the Dark. The first concerns August Brill who is a mostly bed-ridden septuagenarian battling his own mind for sleep. In this midst of this battle, August creates another battle, a second American Civil War where Corporal Owen Brick has been given the assignment of his life—especially considering his life has been the entire sum of Brill's nocturnal mind game—to kill Brill where he isn't sleeping at his home in Vermont. That this second story finishes incompletely is a disappointment to this reader and, seemingly, to Brill himself. The heart of this creator suicide drives the novel up to its midpoint where Brill ends his imaginings and focuses reluctantly on the reality at hand.
And what is that reality? Broken. Brill is broken, literally and figuratively. Though he spends the entire novel in bed complaining of a leg crushed in an automobile accident, the real break involves his divorce from his wife, Sonia, and her death twenty-odd years later. Included in the house with Brill is his daughter, Miriam, who is the victim of a divorce herself, and Katya, his granddaughter and the widow of a man lost to greed and purpose in Iraq. Man in the Dark is a deep and most depressing read, though there is some hope given by Auster in Brill's early morning offer of a farmer's breakfast, Katya's delicate decision to return to school, and Miriam's work on Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel.
And it is in Nathaniel Hawthorne that we finally see what might be the message of Auster's Man in the Dark. In Rose's words, "The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. […] My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return." For whatever is lost, nothing can be returned. Brill's life, all of their lives, speed on like a relentless train in the night.
Man in the Dark is written by Paul Auster and published by Henry Holt, 2008.
—2008-11-06 10:26:36
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