The Oddest Thing Paul Auster’s “The Book Of Illusions” Made Me Think Of
I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and it was an odd experience precisely because of how off it wasn’t. That lack of oddness was in itself odd because it oddly made me think of something totally unrelated. Odd. Odd. Odd.
The Book of Illusions is a well done, realistic book. It is by no means ordinary, but it wasn’t what I was expecting given that the only other fiction I’d read by Auster was The New York Trilogy. If you’ve read The New York Trilogy, you know why unodd realism was the last thing I was expecting. I kept expecting things to turn weird, and they never did. Of course, nothing in The Book of Illusions ever suggested it would and it is a terrible literary sin to expect that one work by an author has anything to do with another.
Still, constantly expecting the weirdness that was not suggested and never came oddly made me think of my voice mail message.
You see, I always liked having odd voice mail messages. When I first started law school, I changed my voice mail message to indicate that I couldn’t come to the phone because I had a Hobbesian stick stuck in my Lockean bundle after one of my constitutional law classes. I loved voice messages like that and always used them.
However, when I started applying for law jobs, one of my friends got enraged that I was using messages like that. She insisted I needed to have a professional message. If a potential legal employer got one of my funny messages, it would all be over. She FORCED me to change my message. Then she called the message to inspect and make sure I had followed orders.
Of course, she was laughing hysterically the entire time. The message was perfectly ordinary. All I said was my name, that I couldn’t come to the phone, and that I’d call back promptly. However, she was so expecting that I would screw around again that she was sure the other shoe would drop at any minute and a joke would break out. So sure the joke was coming despite the fact that it never did, she almost pissed herself laughing at my completely ordinary message. It was probably my funniest message ever, dry humor requiring a very particular context.
Regardless, that’s what I kept thinking of as I read The Book of Illusions, expecting weirdness that would never come. I thought about putting this all in my goodreads review, but it’s just too long a story that really has nothing to do with the book. I just decided to put it here instead.
