Baumgartner by Paul Auster Review

An elderly novelist writing his latest book has a fall and gets help. Then he remembers his dead wife and how they met. The book ends shortly after that.

There was a time when Paul Auster could write great novels - that time is long past. Baumgartner actually started off promisingly - ish. Seeing the protagonist go through his daily life wasn’t edge-of-the-seat reading but it wasn’t as dull as it sounds either. You got a good sense of his personality and the limitations that age has foisted upon him, and a hint at some kind of story when he falls and can’t get up.

Then - the rest of the book happens. This is when the story goes from potentially ok to skull-crushingly, oh my god please fucking end it, irredeemably bad. It’s just Baumgartner remembering his dead wife and their courtship. It’s so, so boring. I went from being put off to gradually coming to loathe the story as Auster steadfastly refused to do anything more than live in the ‘60s/’70s, because that’s when he was a cute young man hooking up with cute young women. This extended flashback, that’s basically the point of the book, is so obnoxiously self-indulgent, it kills any forward momentum and it goes nowhere.

He did the same bloody thing in 4321 but at least this time the book is much shorter so I was able to finish it rather than abandon it for my sanity’s sake. But this is one book too many where Auster’s written about himself yet again in the same time period/part of the world, in the same pointless style, to be forgivable. This sort of book belongs to a special sub-genre of fiction: pathetic fiction. It’s when the author writes the same twee twaddle over and over to increasingly dreary effect.

I may still someday go back and read the Auster novels from the ‘80s and ‘90s I haven’t read, but I won’t read any more new Auster - this isn’t fun; it’s punishment for some unknown thing. Intellectually, I know I should give this a less harsh rating because of that opening act, and Auster’s prose is still good, but if I listen to my heart and soul, that HAAAAAAATED having to slog through the tedious sludge that made up the bulk of the book, my honest rating for Baumgartner would be minus ten stars.

Bumgarbage is about nothing and that’s what I got out of it too.