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A review by mike_baker
Leviathan by Paul Auster
4.0
Reading Leviathan means a lot more to me than normal. It’s a re-read, picking up an old Auster ahead of aiming to tackle his massive 4 3 2 1 at some point. Back in the day, in my 20s as I was discovering the delights of contemporary, ‘literary’ fiction, Auster was kind of my authorial hero. I devoured his works, finding delights in each one, and anyone who knows his interests and subject matter will have little difficulty in appreciating the reasons for this – Auster takes on difficult briefs and makes them seem easy, and there’s a nihilistic ‘floating on the wind’ thread to his work that carries strong appeal, especially to the young and impressionable.
This isn’t to say there’s little or no value to the more mature reader. The point is more that Auster has a very readable narrative style. You can find yourself sucked in to the story because everything flows so well, and only many pages in do you realise you are trapped, like his characters, in some existential minefield. Other writers covering similar themes can be more challenging. I’ve always found Iain McEwan to be like homework, in places a chore, twenty pages of text and I haven’t a clue what’s happening, but that’s never happened with Auster. He writes about weighty, complex matters, and disguises everything within the trappings of easy reading. It’s a bit like watching a grand old Film Noir, the style of which is often taken on by Auster’s writing. You think you’re following a black and white crime drama, but after a time you come to appreciate the film’s saying profound and often pessimistic things about the human condition.
Another way of looking at it is to suggest that as a frustrated writer, he was the kind of author who made me feel as though I could never be as good as this. I think about the fragments of material I wrote back during my ‘Auster’ phase and only now get that I was doing little more than fan fiction, aping his style somewhat nakedly, and even copying his theme of protagonists whose fates are laid bare to the whims of pure chance. Nothing especially wrong with that. I can think of worse authors to copy than Auster, and if I am ever able to put something on to paper that’s as perfectly composed and easy to follow, then I’ll feel as though I’m on the right track.
Years later, retreading the pages of Leviathan, Auster’s great political novel that’s hidden within the reminiscences of a fictional author telling the account of his friend, and the flaws become more apparent. The style’s as crisp as ever and a stack of delicious things take place within its pages, some lovely twists and turns, and there’s a point where I am happy to float along with the dreamlike prose, but at the same time a lot could do with trimming, with judicious editing. Auster’s tendency to write fat, exposition-heavy paragraphs becomes tiresome. Even bearing in mind that Leviathan is written as though it’s the testimony of one man about another, it’s an exercise in indulgence in so many places. I used to lap this stuff up, give me more please, yet now the sheer weight of barely disguised biographical detail and Auster’s preference for writing about how characters feel rather than exposing those emotions via dialogue or physical actions seem like weaknesses.
It’s always a roll of the dice when you read the work of someone you admire so heavily many years down the line. Will it still be as good? Will the impact be anything like it was the first time around? Leviathan is nearly 30 years old, and Auster has written many things since then. Maybe 4 3 2 1 will expose a maturity in the author that, with any luck, retains the style and cuts away many of those younger excesses, but it’s a weighty tome so we’ll have to wait and see. I’d recommend Auster to anyone. His writing style is so good, indeed I would hold him up as an example of how to suck readers in, due to the easy flow and his uncanny ability to make his characters feel like they’ve come to life and it’s his job to try and keep up with their actions. But all this comes with caveats. Years since I first read it, Leviathan falls short of being the perfect novel I once held it up as being. The standard remains high, yet the ceiling is yet to be reached.
This isn’t to say there’s little or no value to the more mature reader. The point is more that Auster has a very readable narrative style. You can find yourself sucked in to the story because everything flows so well, and only many pages in do you realise you are trapped, like his characters, in some existential minefield. Other writers covering similar themes can be more challenging. I’ve always found Iain McEwan to be like homework, in places a chore, twenty pages of text and I haven’t a clue what’s happening, but that’s never happened with Auster. He writes about weighty, complex matters, and disguises everything within the trappings of easy reading. It’s a bit like watching a grand old Film Noir, the style of which is often taken on by Auster’s writing. You think you’re following a black and white crime drama, but after a time you come to appreciate the film’s saying profound and often pessimistic things about the human condition.
Another way of looking at it is to suggest that as a frustrated writer, he was the kind of author who made me feel as though I could never be as good as this. I think about the fragments of material I wrote back during my ‘Auster’ phase and only now get that I was doing little more than fan fiction, aping his style somewhat nakedly, and even copying his theme of protagonists whose fates are laid bare to the whims of pure chance. Nothing especially wrong with that. I can think of worse authors to copy than Auster, and if I am ever able to put something on to paper that’s as perfectly composed and easy to follow, then I’ll feel as though I’m on the right track.
Years later, retreading the pages of Leviathan, Auster’s great political novel that’s hidden within the reminiscences of a fictional author telling the account of his friend, and the flaws become more apparent. The style’s as crisp as ever and a stack of delicious things take place within its pages, some lovely twists and turns, and there’s a point where I am happy to float along with the dreamlike prose, but at the same time a lot could do with trimming, with judicious editing. Auster’s tendency to write fat, exposition-heavy paragraphs becomes tiresome. Even bearing in mind that Leviathan is written as though it’s the testimony of one man about another, it’s an exercise in indulgence in so many places. I used to lap this stuff up, give me more please, yet now the sheer weight of barely disguised biographical detail and Auster’s preference for writing about how characters feel rather than exposing those emotions via dialogue or physical actions seem like weaknesses.
It’s always a roll of the dice when you read the work of someone you admire so heavily many years down the line. Will it still be as good? Will the impact be anything like it was the first time around? Leviathan is nearly 30 years old, and Auster has written many things since then. Maybe 4 3 2 1 will expose a maturity in the author that, with any luck, retains the style and cuts away many of those younger excesses, but it’s a weighty tome so we’ll have to wait and see. I’d recommend Auster to anyone. His writing style is so good, indeed I would hold him up as an example of how to suck readers in, due to the easy flow and his uncanny ability to make his characters feel like they’ve come to life and it’s his job to try and keep up with their actions. But all this comes with caveats. Years since I first read it, Leviathan falls short of being the perfect novel I once held it up as being. The standard remains high, yet the ceiling is yet to be reached.