Since the publication of The New York Trilogy in 1989, the American writer Paul Auster has enjoyed a reputation in Europe rare among contemporary American writers. British critics, slow to praise even the best of US novelists, showered Auster with superlatives. Such was the excitement, it almost had an element of panic to it - panic that they might be missing out on something different. This reaction could partly be explained by the fact his work was so different to that of most of his contemporaries. Auster, who spent several years living in Paris, began his career as an experimentalist, more committed to the literary tricks and coincidences so beloved of France's determinedly intellectual writers than to the domestic realism favoured by his countrymen. His clever, tricky fiction seemed more French than American. So Auster seemed happily poised between the best of both traditions.
Cool and assured and overrated, The New York Trilogy was followed by The Moon Palace in 1989. Still the praise flowed, while some dissenters, such as this reviewer, wondered what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, Auster was speeding to cultdom. The Music of Chance appeared in 1991. An engaging, often funny road novel of sorts, it seemed to suggest that perhaps, finally, Auster was dropping his pretensions. Leviathan was published a year later, to mixed reviews, while Mr Vertigo (1994) confirmed all suspicions - yes, Paul Auster does have a sense of humour.
But regardless of how warmly one might feels about The Music of Chance and Mr Vertigo, Hand To Mouth - a Chronicle of Early Failure (Faber, £15.99 in UK) leaves one wondering not only about Auster's motives and those of his publisher, but asking if fame confers the right to publish rubbish. True, Auster's recent nonfiction collection, The Red Notebook (1995), did suggest that Auster had seriously inflated notions about his essays and that, not content to be a major novelist, he also considers himself to be a major intellectual. The fact that to date there is no evidence of this apparently bothers neither Auster nor his publisher.
The title piece here consists of an impersonal though self-absorbed autobiographical essay chronicling Auster's early struggles as a writer. The summary is far more interesting than the reality. Many novelists have produced wonderful volumes of memoir - think back no further than South African novelist J.M Coetzee's superb recent book, Boyhood. Auster's account of the slow haul towards literary recognition is dull, boring and inexcusably badly written. No only is the prose lifeless, it also manages to include more cliches than might be expected of a serious literary novelist: "She cultivated shopping as a means of self-expression, at times raising it to the level of an art form," he writes of his mother.
Money is identified as central to the collapse of his parents' relationship. Interestingly, the same subject dominates "Hand to Mouth". "Money divided the world into winners and losers," he writes, "haves and have-nots . . . It's a jungle out there, isn't it? Just look at that Dreyfus klion strolling down the the Middle of Wall Street. Could the message be any clearer? Eat or be eaten. That's the law of the jungle, my friend, and if you don't have the stomach for it, then get out while you still can." Exactly whom is this rhetoric aimed at? Also, should you begin fearing for Auster the starving artist in the ghetto, do not forget that this is the story of an ambitious middle-class college boy who wants to be a writer, spends time in Paris, gets some breaks that come to little, and has a stint working on an oil tanker.
As in Auster's fiction, everything here is slightly offbeat. Yet Auster is so detached, his tone so neutral, that even anecdotes are rendered lifeless. "Little by little, I learned how to improvise, trained myself to roll with the punches. During my last two years at Columbia, I took any number of odd freelance jobs, gradually developing a taste for the kind of literary hack work that would keep me going until I was thirty - and which ultimately led to my downfall."
Downfall? What downfall? It would take a writer of far greater skill and humour than Auster to inject any life into this dull monologue, the contents of which suggest he must walk through life with his eyes closed. Further junk lies in store for readers who survive this forgettable essay. Faber have thoughtfully included three early plays - plays so appalling, so embarrassing, that they would encourage even the most talentless writer to have a go at writing something, anything. (Drag out your old school essays. Why not?) In the first play, two tramps - ring any bells? - engage in a hopeless dialogue. Here's a sample. Laurel: "Is this the end?" Hardy: (Pause) "No. This is the beginning." Laurel: "And if I stopped, if I simply stopped and walked away, it wouldn't be the end?" Hardy: "There would be trouble. (Pause) And then what would happen to you? How would you eat?" The trio of plays are so obviously influenced by Beckett they can't even work as clever parodies.
As if the plays aren't enough, a nineteen-page summary of a baseball card game Auster devised and failed to market is included. Why? Who knows? The final half of the book contains the text of a predictable detective novel which begins fairly averagely, and then proceeds to disintegrate into a laboured collection of not very funny one-liners.
Aside from being a humourless, graceless testament to Paul Auster's utter lack of a self-critical capacity, as well as to his publisher's opportunism, a book such as this serves as a cautionary tract. A writer would have to be very, very gifted, very, very famous - nay, immortal - and very, very dead, preferably for about two hundred years, to justify its publication. Auster, however, remains very much alive and may in time pay dearly for a worthless volume which could come to haunt him. And so it should.