Invisible - Part II (June 2014)

[Terry]

This is the place for comment and discussion on Part II of Invisible. Please don't post spoilers on later parts.

How do you feel about the switch to the second person, and the interjection of Jim's notes on assembling the pieces?

Looming over this section of the novel is 'the mad thing you have done together' [p151]. How did you feel about this taboo-challenging chain of events and its recounting? Does the fact that it is recounted in the second person affect your feelings about it?

[Steve]

I am still in the middle of II so I won't comment on the other stuff.

May question is, why are these guys writing letters back and forth? It's 2007, and (so far as I have read)Auster writes as if email never existed.

Things that make me go hmmm.

[Whitney]

Mixed feelings on this section. I am not a big fan of second person perspective in writing. I can think of a few reasons why Auster may have used it here (aside from the 'gimmick' of writing a book told in four different narrative modes :-). It was possibly a way for Walker to distance himself from the events he's relating, or a way for him to put the reader directly in his shoes and make them feel complicit in those events. I think as more of the book unfolds, other reasons suggest themselves as well.

It's hard to say how I would have read it differently if it had been written in first or third person. Which sentence is more affecting, the one as Auster wrote it:

"You don’t want to think about your parents and the eight years you spent walled up in a house of grief", or the third person version

"He didn't want to think about his parents and the eight years he spent walled up in a house of grief"?

To me the first sentence is actually more distancing, it's not my experience so it becomes somewhat academic, while the second version inspires a sympathy with the character who did experience it.

[Steve]

At first, I didn't see the point to the second-person narrative. Aside from a couple of paragraphs where Adam is berating himself, I didn't think it was necessary. Then I started focusing on the fact that it was Adam switching, and I began to wonder why Walker would switch person.

As for the "crazy thing," it is clearly indicative of some deep psychological problems tied to the death of his brother and the fallout with his mother and father. Not only does that subject loom over the section, but so does the accident. It seems they are tied together.

Additionally, Gwyn's character struck me as incongruous with the times. I was only four back then, so I invite anyone to correct me if my suppositions are wrong. It's hard for me to believe that a recent grad of Vassar of all places would have such a casual attitude towards sex in general, let alone talk so openly and lewdly about it. Not so much with the "crazy thing," but her descriptions of her experiences at Vassar--an affair with a professor, her preference for men despite her experimentation. She seems more suited for the modern "hook-up" culture rather than a college student at the very beginning of the changing mores that would become the sexual revolution.

[Lily]

Steve wrote: "Not so much with the "crazy thing," but her descriptions of her experiences at Vassar--an affair with a professor, her preference for men despite her experimentation. She seems more suited for the modern "hook-up" culture rather than a college student at the very beginning of the changing mores that would become the sexual revolution...."

Well, The Group by Mary McCarthy was a best seller by 1963 and was based on her class of 1933. Oscar Wilde's trial was 1896. Just to provide a couple of time-line points about sexual subjects. They do go back further than one expects?

[Sophia]

Steve wrote: "Gwyn's character struck me as incongruous with the times."

She struck me as remarkably 'knowing' for one so young. I'm also curious why they didn't do it again (most children would if it was that good!); and why it's never been mentioned before now. Shame?

I was fine with the distancing second person narrative (even if felt like an Auster 'gimmick'), but I'm left wondering what the point of this section is? Are we merely gathering insights into Adam's character - and his guilty secret - before moving into Autumn?

[Steve]

Lily wrote: "Steve wrote: "Not so much with the "crazy thing," but her descriptions of her experiences at Vassar--an affair with a professor, her preference for men despite her experimentation. She seems more s..."

Fair enough, but would Mary McArthy's characters talk about their activities so openly? Also, I believe Oscar Wilde was found guilty, which would seem to discourage frank discussions.

I have noted a couple of incongruities in the book. I suspect that they are there for a reason, not accidental flaws in the story telling. These are the kinds of puzzles I love in post-modern fiction.

[Lily]

Sophia wrote: "...I was fine with the distancing second person narrative (even if felt like an Auster 'gimmick'),..."

Somehow, this has not been a linear read for me (meaning, I have read closely, then skimmed, jumped, returned and reread, ...), so I probably have a misshapen sense of the novel, but my overall sense has been one of pretentious (but fun) literary allusions embedded in postmodern structural experiments/choices with sensational enough subject matter and enough mystery genre techniques to entrance and (almost?) hold the reader. Yes, gimmicks all over the place -- challenging the reader to recognize them as such -- or not really.

I wouldn't have had the nerve to say it myself, but I did find myself going "oh, yes" to a reviewer that used "banal" to characterize selected passages of prose and dialogue. I think it was the inability of the prose -- the words, the sentences, the (lack of insightful?) similes or metaphors -- to engage me, even while the story line did, that led to this haphazard reading -- much more so than I usually indulge. (Normally, I'd probably have simply set the book aside for something else instead? But I am glad I haven't. Even though the question remains, how much shall I reread?)

[Lily]

Steve wrote: "Fair enough, but would Mary McCarthy's characters talk about their activities so openly? Also, I believe Oscar Wilde was found guilty, which would seem to discourage frank discussions...."

Yes, openness to discuss has changed, probably still is, changing drastically. One can speculate Oscar Wilde's experiences probably particularly tempered the prose of Henry James.

[Lily]

Steve wrote: "I have noted a couple of incongruities in the book. I suspect that they are there for a reason, not accidental flaws in the story telling. These are the kinds of puzzles I love in post-modern fiction..."

Steve -- willing to share your suspicions? Or are you challenging us to find them ourselves? [g]

[Terry]

I saw what you could call banal as fascinatingly 'close' -- drawing me in through not seeming constructed or writerly. It was a strange illusion, like a beautiful painting created from haphazard brushstrokes.

I'm no historian, but while it seems perfectly natural to talk about tendencies in terms of how open the average person was in this kind of talk, it seems to me that there will always have been outliers to any such average. She seemed believable to me as one of these. As I say though, history is not my strong point.

[Whitney]

Walker and his sister are very close, siblings drawn together by the death of their little brother. I had no trouble believing they would talk about very intimate things with each other. I would have found it believable even if it wasn't taking place in 1967, but that's smack dab in the midst of the sexual revolution, when conventions were changing so that sex was no longer the taboo subject it had been in American culture.

Even if it hadn't been, as Terry said, what society is doing (or pretending its doing) and what a pair of individuals are doing in their apartment aren't usually the same thing. Walker acknowledges that his relation with his sister isn't exactly typical.

[Lily]

Whitney wrote: "Walker acknowledges that his relation with his sister isn't exactly typical...."

Nor even a "typical" literary topic. I found myself making comparisons with Paperboy by Bob Thurber, a selection here a number of months ago now.

I was deeply touched by Auster's portrayal of what the death of a child can do to a family. Even if not directly, Auster gave form to at least part of the impact on father, mother, and siblings -- and especially how the reactions of the parents impacted the remaining children. Seemed bordering on a post-modern Old Testament cautionary tale?

[Steve]

Lily wrote: "Steve wrote: "I have noted a couple of incongruities in the book. I suspect that they are there for a reason, not accidental flaws in the story telling. These are the kinds of puzzles I love in pos..."

Sharing my suspicions is tricky, because I am now on section IV, but I think at this point in the story I suspected that we were being presented with a memoir that was embellished. The subtly odd details of the first part (a 20-year-old who throws together a plan to start a new magazine, the offer of payment)made sense in the second part when I learned they were not simply the story, but a memoir, and therefore, could be seen as embellished.

As I read the story, I suspected that the way Adam wrote the memo was supposed to tell me something about Adam as much as it was relaying the story about 1967. Why else would Auster present it this way? He could have simply told the story in his own voice and his own way. Instead, he created a character, a fictional writer. I suspect he created a fictional voice for his fictional writer as well, so that we should wonder why Adam--not Auster--included this detail, or left out that one, or chose to characterize something a particular way.

What I see as incongruous about Gwynn reflects on Adam as a writer. Or it could mean nothing at all and I simply viewed period as being more prudish that it was.

[Lily]

Terry wrote: "I saw what you could call banal as fascinatingly 'close' -- drawing me in through not seeming constructed or writerly. It was a strange illusion, like a beautiful painting created from haphazard br..."

Terry -- here is a passage from Clancy Martin's review that touches on the use of "banal" relative to Invisible and Auster:

(view spoiler)[

This being an Auster novel, accidents visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky. One evening, while walking along Riverside Drive, Born and Walker are held up by a young black man, Cedric Williams. “The gun was pointed at us, and just like that, with a single tick of the clock, the entire universe had changed” is Walker’s banal gloss. Born refuses to hand over his wallet, draws a switchblade, and ruthlessly stabs the young man (whose gun, it turns out, was unloaded). Walker knows that he should call the police, but the next day Born sends a threatening letter: “Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it.” Full of shame, Walker goes to the authorities, but Born has left for Paris.

One might tolerate the corny Born, and his cinemaspeak, if Adam Walker, who narrates much of the novel in one way or another, were not himself such a bland and slack writer. He is supposed to be a dreamy young poet, but he’s half in love with easeful cliché. Born “was just thirty-six, but already he was a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person,” we’re told. Adam has an affair with Born’s girlfriend, but “deep down I knew it was finished.” Born was “deep in his cups by the time he poured the cognac.” “Why? I said, still reeling from the impact of Born’s astounding recitation about my family.”

Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute’s eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster’s previous work.) “Leviathan” (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster named Peter Aaron, who tells us about the doomed life of another writer, Benjamin Sachs. But Peter Aaron can’t be much of a writer. He describes Benjamin Sachs’s first novel like this: “It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.” Lest you are tempted to chalk all this up to an unreliable narrator—“But he’s supposed to write like that”—consider August Brill, the seventy-two-year-old literary critic who narrates Auster’s novel “Man in the Dark” (2008). Like Nathan Zuckerman in “The Ghost Writer,” he lies awake in a New England house, inventing fantastic fictions. (He imagines an alternative universe, in which America is fighting a bitter civil war over the fate of the 2000 election.) When he thinks about actual America, however, his language stiffens into boilerplate. Recalling the Newark riots of 1968, he describes a member of the New Jersey State Police, “a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission.”

Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. “Madame Bovary” actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary’s conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people’s germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it.

This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot. Nashe, in “The Music of Chance” (1990), sounds as if he had sprung from a Raymond Carver story (although Carver would have written more interesting prose):

(Bold added.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/boo...

(hide spoiler)]

Interesting -- but no more so than the comments here.

(See the James Wood review in The New Yorker, referred to elsewhere in these posts, for further comments on "banal" relative to Auster.)

(view spoiler)[
"A narrator who trades in such banalities is difficult to credit, and the writer who lends him those words seems uninterested in persuading us that they mean anything....

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics...
(hide spoiler)]

[Zulfiya]

Many of you commented on the switch to the second person narrator, one of the rarest in literature, with the infusion of another storyteller, Walker's fellow student, but to me the change of the narrator is also associated with the change of the narrative tense.

Part I was mostly in the past tense while readers widely assumed that the events were in the past but not in the distant past. In Part II we are given a direct confirmation that more than 30 years lie between the Born accident and the fictional current events, yet, despite this temporal admission, the narrator in Summer mostly uses THE PRESENT NARRATIVE TENSE when it is obvious even to readers that we are told the past story by a dying man.

The present tense, together with the second-person narrator, creates that uncomfortable feeling of uneasiness when we know that the story ended, but we while the events unfold, we are mostly clueless about the narrative yarn. What's more - the past tense often creates an allusion that we as readers can control the narrative while the present tense, on a psychological level, deprives readers of such a feeling. It is as if we are witnessing whatever Adam is chronicling in his book.

I think another explanation is his feeling of shame. Using a new narrator, less personal that the 'I of the story', he puts a distance between his past and his current state, and that allows him to continue writing a confessing memoir if it is not a literary post-modern trick of sorts :-)
Readers, on the contrary, can find this narrator more relatable because the pronoun 'you' is often subconsciously associated with us, readers, when we read.

I also find that parts of Part I are making more sense now because even if we believed that Adam was mostly innocent and was tempted by Born in Part I, but in fact, how innocent was Adam when he met Born and Margot? Of course, it is highly debatable if this sexual experimentation without an actual consummation was corruption because it was not an ethical issue, but interpreting the book in the line of Biblical allusions, one can believe that Adam had already been exposed to corruption in his puberty.

[Terry]

I kind of see what Clancy Martin is driving at, but I think he is missing the wood for the trees (to use a phrase he'd no doubt hate...). The style draws me in and creates tension. It does do something more with the cliche -- it makes a whole out of it that is compelling and resonant.

I hadn't even thought about the present tense usage, Zulfiya. How odd. You're entirely right about what it does.

I agree about the relatable nature of second person. It's almost like the royal you, the occasional stand-in for the 'one' that has been labelled too posh for most users of English.

[Angie]

Zulfiya wrote: "Many of you commented on the switch to the second person narrator, one of the rarest in literature, with the infusion of another storyteller, Walker's fellow student, but to me the change of the na..."

I noticed the present tense, too, because I usually find it off-putting. I've asked other readers, and I don't think I have much company in that, but the standard 3rd-person present tense feels gimmicky to me, like someone is trying to convince me they don't speak English very well -- it usually shows up in stories about immigrants for some reason (I think a Lisa See book was the most recent place I saw it).

But the 2nd person voice somehow made present tense more palatable for me. People use this voice conversationally when they're describing a common experience. Comics use it a lot. Dontchya hate that summer heat in your car? You're tired, you just wanna go home, you open the door, and bang! it hits you and sucks all your breath out.

Okay, I'm not a comic in any sense of the word, but hopefully I've made my point. I feel like the 2nd person present tense is from an effort to make this relationship that Adam sees as shameful appear to be a common human experience, to take the shock value out of it.

[Casceil]

Good points, Angie. I hadn't thought about the use of 2nd person present tense in that light, but I think you are right.

[Tiffany]

Narrator-switch: I think the switch to the second-person narrator was kind of gimmicky, but I couldn't figure out *whose* gimmick it was: Adam's or Auster's? In other words, did Auster use the second-person narrator because *Adam* was stuck so *Adam* decided to (or would have decided to, if he were real) switch narrators, as Jim suggested, or because *Auster* needed the narrator switch?

I do see the value of it, though, in Adam distancing himself from the "disgusting" events of his life. It's not easy to describe in detail the things you hate about yourself, so switching narrators could give him the opportunity to fully describe the events and what was in his head, but without making himself or his readers hate him.

The family's grief: like Lily said, I think Auster did a good job of portraying how the younger son's death affected the whole family, including the encounters between Adam and Gwyn. Thankfully I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but from what I can imagine (and TV, movies, and other books), that tragedy could really screw up the other kids. Add to that their ages, the sexual revolution, and the fact that they'd always felt extremely tight with each other, and I don't think the "event" between them seemed all that far-fetched. (view spoiler)[The second time didn't surprise me, either. That almost had a big flashing arrow: the alcohol, feeling lonely, missing their brother... We had to see that one coming. (hide spoiler)]

And going back to the topic of Born and Margot from part I, Gwyn says that she thinks Born was attracted to Adam, and I thought "Yes! That's what it was!" As I read the party scene in part I, I had that feeling in the back of my mind, but it never developed all the way. But Gwyn said it, so I felt validated. Or at least like I wasn't imagining the possibility.

[Casceil]

I liked Tiffany's point that people use second person conversationally when they're describing a common experience. I think having the story told that way is also an implicit plea to the reader, put yourself in my place.

[Lily]

Casceil wrote: "I liked Tiffany's point that people use second person conversationally when they're describing a common experience. I think having the story told that way is also an implicit plea to the reader, p..."

It must be fun to take a writing course under Auster. (I'm not checking -- he does teach, too?)

(Okay, I can't quite tell the extent of his teaching from the Wiki article, but it is quite interesting for its insights, including the differences in his reception in the U.S. versus Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Auster )

[LindaJ^]

I blew through Part II this morning and continue to enjoy the writing style. The switch of tense did not seem gimmicky to me and, as Tiffany notes, it was perhaps a way to convey what he thinks, in hindsight, was a terrible thing and make it more normal seeming.

And Steve, as someone who was in high school in the late 1960's, I had no problems finding Gwyn very believable. I think the early years of the "sexual revolution" were the most dramatic and over the top. By the mid-70's, I think, it calmed down.

I don't know what makes an author's style modern, post-modern, or American realism so cannot comment on those points. But, regardless of what the style is, I am enjoying the book so far and eager to find out what happens next in Paris.

[Zulfiya]

Linda wrote: "I blew through Part II this morning and continue to enjoy the writing style."

I also found the book immensely and compellingly readable and read it in three-four days.