IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS
Paul Auster
Viking Penguin, 1987
188 pp., $15.95
When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but the probable and ordinary course of man's experience. The former - while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart - has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's distinction between a romance and a novel, expressed in the preface to The House of Seven Gables, serves as an informative point from which to look at Paul Auster's enigmatic fiction. The novels (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, and the most recent, In the Country of Last Things) aim not at the "minute fidelity" of realism that the New Englander describes, but within the scope of Auster's imaginary cities, unswervingly draw truthful and satisfying pictures of the human heart and mind. Like Hawthorne's, too, these works may be romances, but they are decidedly and importantly unromantic. While the comparison might amuse Auster, (who is a witty writer indeed), it would hardly surprise him, for he draws upon Hawthorne, implicitly and explicitly, in his New York trilogy, and uses a quotation from him as epigraph to his newest novel, In the Country of Last Things.
In the City of Destruction
"These are the last things," begins Anna Blume in the blue notebook where she records her story. "One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up." Given the puerile self-consciousness of so many recent "city" novels, and the foolish apocalyptical polemics of the inexplicably popular The Handmaid's Tale, the reader is forgiven if his heart begins to sink here at the prospect of another. No, he may mourn, not another sophomoric dilution of Camus and Sartre. Not at all, I am happy to report.
While Auster's subjects (and Anna's, though she doesn't quite name them) are the important ones of history and memory, art and language, he never deals with them as abstractions. They are living concerns to living characters.
Anna, the protagonist of In the Country of Last Things, has traveled from her own country, passing, as the Hawthorne epigraph puts it, "through the gate of dreams…[to] that region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction" in search of her missing brother, a journalist sent to "get the story." But he has disappeared (a few short dispatches, and then silence") and she cannot return. The ports are closed, and no one in the chaotic, unnamed city remembers what an airplane is. Her task becomes the simple one of enduring, putting one foot before the other again and again, though she wonders at the strength of her will to
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