When I was an English grad-student in the 90's, there was a certain kind of guy I observed who loved language passionately, a word-geek, you know? Pale, fastidious, carrying his fountain pen or carafe of espresso with him everywhere he went, along with his worn copy of "Ulysses," he either went the Ph.D. route or decided to write, in which case he went from MFA workshop to writing fellowship, bouncing from place to place every year or so, aspiring to semi-permanence as an instructor somewhere. Sensitive, intelligent, aware of his lack of machismo, he relied on words as a weapon, and as his 20's turned to 30's, his troubles increased, for now he was the impoverished writer/student type, while the extroverted, less-idealistic types had the wives and homes and you get the picture. For the aspiring male writer, in my opinion, the subconscious sense of suspended adulthood and marginalized masculinity could sometimes be acute; pushing 40 in an elite fellowship, where he was paid a stipend to finish his novel, the one he'd started in his 20's about a boy saddened by his parents' divorce, say, he was in a dangerous place: rootless, essentially without life experience and family responsibilities, without knowledge of work or craft beyond academia, coddled yet deprived by its protective culture, his work ironically de-potentated by its paternalism.

Very often, this type of guy showed certain preferences in his work: his stories might have "tough" male types, like those from noir films, expressions of his desire to be active in the world and streetwise and tough; very often his stories would begin with a male character who'd lost his wife and child, conveniently making the character sympathetic, by giving him a back story, an explanation for his current state of almost autistic insularity, while also protecting the writer from having to write about such things. The writer now had to compensate for many weaknesses in his work due to his lack of life experience, compounded perhaps by his innate introversion, love of words, sensitivities, etc., and so, in lieu of real human interaction, his main character might spend a lot of time smoking cigarettes, visiting "blowsy tarts" or doing something shocking (!) like sitting on the toilette. (Oh, I'm sure Auster spawned "Fight Club" at the very least.) A story could be written in such a way that if, for example, the setting was New York, someone who'd never been there and was only referencing a map, could do it. Then he'd display his one true strength in a bit of aggressive word-play, going philosophical with puns and ideas about language and its limits. Professors of creative writing, jaded in appetite, likewise insulated, seemed to especially approve of violence or sexual perversion to spice-up those intellectual interludes.

Any of this ring a bell? Auster's work here jogged my memory of this smart yet developmentally-delayed male type, so aware of his sensitivity that he resorts to images of violent masculinity and portrayals of women as mommies. Mommy, the desire to return to infancy. The death instinct. All of which is not to say that his work is not compulsively readable here; it is a test-case for the effectiveness of suspense as a device within plot, carrying the reader along against her will. But I feel cheated, and I don't like to be so tightly controlled by a writer's agenda. I prefer a messier aesthetic, an excess of consciousness and life, as one gets in Proust or Shakespeare, spilling over the edges, as one gets in much good non-fiction, the letters of Van Gogh, for example. The coolest thing about these novellas, I think, is how Auster came up with an analogy to describe the writer's paradox, the writer's problem, in his angry deconstruction of the mystery genre--how someone temperamentally a writer, who craves solitude necessary to write, who believes that real life is the internal life of thoughts and emotions, can somehow perform the alchemy necessary to create fiction with its demands for action in the physical world, for plot, for drama. That's what I love best about this schizoid, paranoid, hermetic, manipulative, redundant and disingenuous trilogy. But I still want more life------!

I havn't read the book yet but I did receive it in the amount of time stated and in good condition.