Hand to Mouth

A Chronicle of Early Failure

By Paul Auster
Henry Holt, $25
ISBN 0805054065


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Review by Charles Flowers

This odd coupling of autobiographical tidbit (129 out of a total 449 pages) and rejected youthful writing has earned Paul Auster quite a few jibes in literary circles. He's been accused of cleaning out his desk drawers and dumping the contents willy-nilly for his most eager fans, who tend to be Generation Xers nurtured by so-called post-modern fiction in their college years in the mid-1980s.

This rap on "Hand to Mouth" isn't entirely fair. Most successful now as a novelist, Auster is an admirably determined writer who has literally waged a career since first publishing poetry in 1970. A skilled and self-conscious craftsman of the language, he is also adept with games, symbols and foxy blends of fiction and reality.

Here, the autobiographical fragment, "A Chronicle of Early Failure," is presented as a portrait of the artist as starving hack, with Auster and his wife scrabbling for cash in the byways of translation and editing. Meanwhile, his arty one-act plays fail, his get-rich-quick scheme of selling a baseball game fails, and his first detective novel more or less dies as a publishing house fails.

This odd coupling
of autobiographical tidbit
and rejected youthful writing
has earned Paul Auster
quite a few jibes
in literary circles.
Why, then, resuscitate these orphaned pieces, including 12 pages of the illustrated cards from the baseball game, in this volume? The answers lie both inside and outside the book. On the one hand, various characters and events and obsessions in the autobiography are reflected in the previously unsold writing. On the other, echoes from these spurned efforts in "Hand to Mouth" ricochet throughout Auster's recent successes elsewhere. The characters of the flat one-acter, "Blackouts," anticipate those in "Ghosts," the second novel in his highly regarded New York Trilogy of post-modern detective fiction. The building of an irrational wall in the playlet, "Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven," along with certain memories in the autobiography of working at seedy resorts in the Catskills evidently helped shape Auster's strong novel, "The Music of Chance."

Who will care most about such reflections and resonances? Perhaps readers who see Auster's finest work as profoundly revelatory of the problems of establishing identity and defining reality, especially in contemporary urban settings, will enjoy this opportunity to follow the dialogue implied here between his life, his early "failures" and the recent fiction that has given him a robust reputation, though more in western Europe than here.

In addition, "Hand to Mouth" should intrigue anyone -- writer or teacher or reader -- who likes to explore how an artist's life, financial struggles and eventual discovery of a personal voice can be intertwined. Then, too, "Hand to Mouth" may pique the interest of screenheads who liked the cult movie "Smoke," which was scripted by Auster.

Not to be disdained as stale rummage, this collection creatively evokes the stumblings of the writer's inner life, a rare achievement in biography or autobiography of an artist in any field.

Charles Flowers' next book, "A Science Odyssey" (William Morrow), is a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for January.

©1997, ProMotion, inc.

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