Nothing in the world of Paul Auster's Invisible is straightforward. Reading it is an experience akin to wandering a hall of funhouse mirrors, or perhaps an descent into the different circles of Dante's hell, to borrow a literary reference that Mr. Auster himself takes in the opening pages. I had never read any of his novels before but my immediate conclusion was that he is a writer of immense talent and complexity. While I wouldn't accuse him of being esoteric, just try to keep up with the rest of his literary references.
The most pressing question Invisible raises is what separates the author from his novel. Much has already been made autobiographical references in his work and this instance, they thicken the plot even more. Auster was a student at Columbia University, translated French poems, spent time abroad in France. The main protagonist of his novel, Adam Walker, is also a Columbia student who travels to Paris. He translates French poems and as it turns out, has a familiarity with a certain twelfth-century Provencal poet that turns up in the pages of Dante's Inferno and gives the antagonist of the novel his name.
Invisible is divided into four sections. The first devotes itself to the point-of-view of Walker as the interestingly named professor and his withdrawn yet alluring girlfriend introduce themselves to the struggling undergrad poet at a party in the spring of 1967. It's an innocuous enough beginning to a relationship that becomes twisted in tragedy. One incident will go on to mark Adam forever. The second part jumps to James Freeman, Adam's friend from his college days, as he resumes contact with Adam many years later as a well-known novelist. The third part moves to Paris, where Adam almost unconsciously seeks out the professor and his old girlfriend and clumsily tries to reinstate himself on better moral ground. The fourth part ties up loose ends back in what accounts for the present, or perhaps goes to untie more.
Walker, as it turns out, is attempting to write the biography of his own life and the novel is largely parts of this biography. Freeman advises him on how to get over a difficult hump, recommending a point-of-view shift that is also incorporated. "I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself)," Freeman explains himself, and perhaps the author, as he recalls his own attempts at a memoir. The most shocking part of the novel, arguably, is evoked in the second-person; Walker's transgressions become the readers' transgressions in the accusatory "you".
Freeman is left with the task of finishing Walker's biography, which is what he has been doing all along, but with admitted considerable changes to names and such things. As Freeman tells us, his name is not James Freeman, but we cannot be sure that it is or is not Paul Auster either. More elements of the story are thrown into doubt, and it becomes hard to separate the truth from the lies.
I would definitely recommend that you pick up this book. You would be a bit unsettled, and a bit confused as Auster has surely intended you to be, but the book is quick reading. I pushed through it in a matter of days, eager for the conclusions that reaching the end would bring. Auster makes nothing easy for us but instead uses his considerable skills to provoke thought about the art of writing, the nature of sexual attraction, the potential of the human mind and the depravity into which it can sink. Read it.
Buy Invisible.
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