...
Show More
I admire Paul Auster's fiction and its neo-allegorical explorations of the existential (I pulled that phrase from the Alphabet Soup I ate for lunch-- seriously), and while I've enjoyed the thematic tension and play of his novels, I've always had reservations about his prose style; for a major writer, his sentences are often as dulcet and graceful as cavemen playing a game of jacks. This collection of essays and prefaces on mainly avant-garde-ish writers (I'll ignore the interviews, which are mostly biographical and craft-related) is more informational than astute, and finds his writing sharpened, but dull: the architecture of the sentences and paragraphs is more adroit (with the exception of the titular essay, which reads like a slightly precocious undergrad paper-- it may well be), but the rhetoric is austere and unengaging. Despite having started his career as a poet, Auster displays limited flair for metaphor, simile, and lyricism (these may seem glamour qualms, but sometimes it's the eyeshadow in a writer's voice that catches your eye). And his observations and points, the meat of the book, are, while occasionally pungent, more often bland and regurgitated. Nonetheless, Auster is a vital mainstream contemporary author, and is to be commended for offering selections from his personal canon of influences, many of whom seem delicacies one would forego otherwise.
