Forty. Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster
1996, Faber and Faber, 436 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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For a time in the early 2010’s, I was worried that the well of amazing narratives and plot twists and turns, that Paul Auster has been drawing from for his entire career, has gone dry. There were autobiographical pieces of work, several of them — and while each has been dealing with a different aspect, or had a different quirk — one was dedicated to the history of bodily parts, for example; another written completely in the second person — they have become quite exhausting to read, maybe even to write. In one of them, if I remember correctly, Auster started referencing his other autobiographical works for brevity.
But it was just a matter of perspective. My perspective, that is, was clouded by the fact I had only happened to buy, or be given, only Auster’s autobiographical works, while he continued to write novels, and translate books, and handle all sorts of writing and other assignments, almost with the same frequency as previous decades. The fount of amazing narratives and ideas was never dry.
The book that started it all, for me at least (looking at a chronicle of Auster’s writing I can see that it is actually the third autobiographical work of his), is Hand to Mouth. As with all of the rest of Auster’s works of autobiographical nature, it is dedicated to a particular aspect of his life, as framed by its subtitle — a chronicle of early failure.
The work in question, the one that bears the title of the book, occupies less than a third of the book itself. Augmenting it are three large appendices — bodies of proof to the history Auster unfolds in the first part of the book. The first of which contains three one act plays, that Auster had written early in his career. The first of which, Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven, will be familiar to everyone who has read The Music of Chance; the second is a copy of, and an exhaustive set of instructions to, a card game Auster invented allowing to play a portable version of baseball, in an early incarnation of an alternative career; the third is Auster’s debut novel, Squeeze Play, which is a straight edge noir detective novel. Auster has deliberately maintained all of the tropes of the genre, but given that it’s a Paul Auster novel — even at this early point of his career — it has its own charm and flourish, and it draws you in quickly from the first page until the culmination of the novel.
When all of it — the short memoir and its long addenda — is over, you are left with a distinct feeling that the choice of subtitle was wrong. This is not the chronicle of an early failure, but a fascinating exploration of a series of footings, some wrong; an attempt to describe a path in a wild wood, a path that ends in a clearing that maybe hides within it that well, overflowing with great ideas, may they never run out.
