Books like Mr. Vertigo

For Your Own GoodWhat is this thing? A parable of spiritual self-development? A re-telling of the Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch? A case study in Stockholm Syndrome? Whatever Auster meant it to be, it is uninspiring, unedifying, and, as far as I can tell, meaningless - a collection of miscelaneous writerly nits and pieces dumped in the same bin bag of a novel because the mess was getting underfoot. It may be a dot on the literary map of Auster’s journey but not much more.Exceptionally cruel child abuse in the cause of a carnival levitation act is not the most promising of story lines. Nor are the characters involved in the story - the obnoxious St. Louis street urchin, the Hungarian rabbi and mystical teacher, the ricketty black genius from Georgia, the drunken Wichita widow on the make, and the toothless Sioux matron who rode with Wild Bill Cody. They are little more than just weird ‘types’, ingredients thrown together to see what the resulting goulash might taste like. And aside from the ‘wax on, wax off’ 33-Step Program by the Mr. Miyagi-like Hungarian Master, there is no intellectual or spiritual take-away.The relentless prose of the senescent narrator as he relates his largely non-adventures is relieved only occasionally by his youthful voice of sarcasm, resistance, and regret. But that too gets old rapidly. The mystery of the missing 60 years or so between the two is not enough to sustain the reader’s attention. Sure “there comes a time in every levitator’s career when the air is fraught with peril” But that doesn’t really conjure up any sympathy. Nor does it explain the transition by the urchin from carnival act to baseball-obsessed mobster and on to launderette manager with a sexual penchant for the elderly. It frequently appears that Auster loses interest in his own story when he has nothing on the shelf to fill in page-bulk. An absurd fantasy about the baseball player Dizzy Dean goes on interminably; While crucial decades are compressed into single sentences. Motivations are absent, forced, or just silly. Something is driving these people but it’s never described much less defined. And whatever it is has no connection with life as it exists on this planet, except perhaps Auster’s deadline. It is not inconceivable that Auster internalised Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, written two decades previously, and decided it would be better re-written in the style of Gabriel Garcia Márquez - a sort of North American magic realism. A very strange melange, quesadillas with maple syrup perhaps. It’s not a great theory but at least it stops further fruitless search for significance beyond Auster’s implicit advice to steer clear of Kansas. But that I already knew.