THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (BY) PAUL AUSTER

Published 1990, 308 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I first read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy two years ago, I did not know what to make of it.  It's a purposefully obscure book, with each of the three interconnected novellas offering its own difficulties, despite each telling similar stories.  I thought I liked it, but I could not have told you specifically why.  To appreciate the Trilogy, you should probably enjoy detective fiction, meta-narratives, elaborate, abstract metaphors and writers writing about writers writing about writers (often with more layers and levels than Inception).  After this second read of the Trilogy, I still can't claim to understand everything that Auster was trying to convey, but I can say that the New York Trilogy is probably now on my list of favorite books. It's difficult, it's depressing and bleak, it's slowly paced and full of possibly impossible riddles, but Auster writes with confidence and deliberation that few other writers can match.  There is always the sense that he is simply that much cleverer than you — the Trilogy is willing to hold on to its secrets, but you could unravel them with enough effort.  As the narrator reiterates throughout, there is never a wasted word, never an insignificant thought.

It would be nearly impossible to describe the plot of these novellas without sabotaging the book's meticulous construction, but there are general themes and structures that hold each together.  Each story is, in a way, the same story: that of a detective stuck on a dull, uneventful case for such a long time that he eventually turns his analytical eye upon himself and faces an existential crises.  In two of the novellas, the "detective" is only a writer forced by chance to play the role of a private eye.  By necessity, then, nothing happens for long periods of time, so it's easy to see how some could become bored with this.  (It's almost inevitable that you will be frustrated, if not bored — I certainly was, even the second time around).  The Trilogy has all the trappings of a noir at the start, but it's only a detective novel in the meta sense, turning the conventions and grittiness of noir on their end in order to unravel the identity of character, writer and reader.  It's a brilliant move by Auster, and though the book is certainly paced on the slower side, I was never once bored.  Everything is so carefully constructed, literally no image or abstraction is wasted.  It's certainly a complicated novel, but the narrative itself moves forward linearly, and it's never difficult to discern what's actually happening — it's only difficult to figure out the significance of what is happening.  The mysteries here are of a vague, internal sort, sprinkled with strange subplots and metaphorical overtones.  One side character is obsessed with the Tower of Babel, and a detective is forced to follow him on cryptic scavenger hunts throughout the city as this man attempts to create a new, perfect language.  In the second (probably most obscure and frustrating) story, every character is named after a color: Black, Blue, White, etc.  The narrator of the third story claims that he wrote the first two, and elements from each bleed into one another — sometimes names, mostly themes, and surely the anxiety each narrator faces.  Another winking discussion involves the true author and significance of Don Quixote, and its many implications — characters-as-writers and writers-as-characters, duplicity and subversion — likely serve as a linchpin to unraveling the meaning of the entire Trilogy.

Auster is as careful with his language as he is with his plotting, and his assurance that every obscurity has its secret meaning is what keeps the Trilogy from becoming another pretentious exercise in lazy ambiguity.  His workmanlike prose fits the style of the stories, and though I would call his writing poignant and sharp, it rarely tries to be beautiful on its own.  This is not a poetic novel, and Auster wisely refrains from stacking metaphors and similes upon each other in order to describe the difficult world of his characters.  The prose is descriptive, clean, precise, but grounded in reality, making the strangeness of the plots seem all the stranger.  In this sense, The New York Trilogy could almost be considered magic realism, a genre that should contrast sharply with noir.  Yet it works, mostly because Auster has something to say.  So much to say, in fact, that it doesn't seem to matter if you miss a lot of it.  Unlike a detective novel, it's not the specifics that are meant to add up.  It's the general feeling of unease, the realization that there's more than you can possibly keep track of, more details than you can make sense of — there is significance in this, not the specifics themselves.  The feelings that the Trilogy leaves are not comfortable ones.  This book is never graphic or disturbing in the conventional sense, and there's almost no violence at all, but certain scenes and thoughts left me feeling unsettled and unhappy, even horrified.  It would be easy to transpose those negative feelings back onto the novel.  But then, you realize what Auster has done.

NAKED (BY) DAVID SEDARIS

Published 1998, 224 pages
Characters: N/A

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: B

It's always an interesting experience re-reading something you enjoyed a great deal in the past.  I was a huge fan of David Sedaris in college, so I've already read every one of his books. Recently I needed a quick book to kill some time, and there was Naked, sitting on my shelf, untouched for probably six or seven years. I was curious to see how it fared, since I seem to be awfully jaded when it comes to comedy, of late.

Naked, like all of Sedaris' stuff, is a collection of autobiographical short stories, mostly detailing his childhood, family, wacky college adventures and difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality.  The events in Naked are probably mostly true, but embellishment is part of Sedaris' authorial voice, so there's really no point in pondering how he could possibly remember a detailed conversation from 30 years ago. It's the events that matter, and the rest is clearly filled in by the author, writing retrospectively.  With that said — and having read his other books, which cover various other periods of his life — Sedaris has lived a remarkably tumultuous life that gave him plenty of material.  It's often difficult to believe that all these stories are about the same man, especially when the focus of one piece — his OCD, for example, which must have been a major part of his childhood — disappears entirely from the rest.  This is partly due to Sedaris' casual, flippant story construction.  He shapes each piece much like a sitcom, taking unrelated elements and weaving them into a purpose-driven plot, usually ending in some conclusion or retrospective revelation.  The fact that his OCD provided the basis for one story seems to have been enough, and he barely mentions it again — a sign of good focus and plot construction, I suppose, but it gives the collection a lightweight, surreal tone.  This is comedy, after all, and given the "PG-13"ish rating of some of the material, Sedaris plays it very tame.  Nothing really carries any weight — not his OCD, not his near-rape encounters with strangers while hitchhiking, not even his mother's death.  And that's fine; it fits his style.  Sedaris manages to produce tales that seem sharp and quick and enjoyable, regardless of their content.

If I can pinpoint one main reason that I failed to enjoy Naked as much as I did the first time around, it's that the stories are too tidy. Everything is so droll, skipping from one event to the next with little fanfare. Cleanly-presented material needs a bit of shock value to produce laughs.  Being older and more jaded, nothing in the collection was cringe-worthy or outrageous anymore, and most of the time it seemed like Sedaris was going out of his way to interact with the stupidest, most-ignorant people he could find.  He plays himself off as incredibly passive, a naive victim blundering from one bizarre event to the next with a sort of recklessness and ambivalence that eventually begins to raise flags.  How could someone so passive find himself in these situations again and again?  It's not that I don't believe him, but you start to see through his tone, and the authorial voice seems like just that — a style, something manufactured and deliberated upon. Since Sedaris mostly reacts as a narrator, and rarely as an in-the-action character, he seems to be merely drifting through life, prodding those around him in the hope that they'll produce material.  Despite this, there isn't a whole lot of comedy in the prose itself.  There are no jokes, per se, just funny situations.  It's entertaining, easily-digested, and little more.  I know I laughed the first time around.  But now, I honestly had a hard time trying to decide what was supposed to be funny about these stories. 

So perhaps its best to put aside expectations that this will be an outrageous laugh-fest, as most reviews would have it.  It's decently funny, in the way that a competent sitcom is decently funny, or at least entertaining.  And really, that's all it needs to be.  Considering that his material is far beyond anything you'd find in a sitcom, Sedaris doesn't take many risks with his narrative.  I suppose part of my disappointment is the contradiction in this — for everything that happened to him, for all the insanity he faced, Sedaris himself should be at least slightly unhinged, and yet he comes off as far too even-tempered.  He's condescending and snarky, but he never makes much effort to earn it, as if he's worried one of his victims might still find him out.  Still, by all means, read Naked at least once.  Just don't expect to die laughing.  Life is weird enough as it is, and it's all in what you make of it.

JOHN DIES AT THE END (BY) DAVID WONG

Published 2009, 373 pages

Characters: B+

Writing: B

Plot/Pacing: B-

Poignancy: A

John Dies At the End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pagrin aka David Wong, has a history almost as complicated as the story it tells. Originally written as an online serial before transforming into the hardcover available in bookstore's today, Wong's publishing success is a heart-warming DIY underdog tale, just as John Dies At the End is a heart-warming underdog tale of one man's obsession with his own penis.  Secondary to that, it's also the story of two friends confronting supernatural evil and the fragile, tenuous nature of reality.  As pure page-turning entertainment, Wong's novel succeeds so effortlessly that one might not even notice just how unconventional the book's narrative and voice are. JDATE is a headcrab that clings to your skull and just won't stop humping your brain.  It's possibly a classic of its genre — assuming you can settle on a genre to put it in — the rare story that successfully combines comedy and horror without ever trivializing its characters or sacrificing inventiveness.  So yes, the horse I'm trying to beat here is this: John Dies At the End is original.  Shockingly so — and I mean that, despite the comedic, casual tone, this book is actually shocking. The horror isn't just there as a sort of foil to bounce penis jokes off of — well, sometimes, maybe — but with all the wild ideas presented in JDATE, some of them are going to keep you up at night. 

The comedy is largely driven by the novel's nonchalant protagonists, eccentric video-game generation small-town twenty-somethings Dave and John.  The two serve as both straight-men to the increasingly surreal events unfolding around them — glib and dismissive in the face of supernatural evil, as if the possibility of humanity's extinction was just more bullshit foisted upon them by a world they already knew to be unrelentingly stupid — and also the source of the comedic tone, nearly matching the surrealist horror around them for batshit crazy unpredictability.  Yet they aren't played cheaply — their deadpan, cynical view of the world is increasingly linked to a dark, very-real childhood. With a few deft moments, Wong connects the cruelty of adolescence with something far vaster and more terrifying.  For all the cheap laughs, Dave in particular becomes a vivid, wholly original character, and one that remains recognizable and real even when he's bouncing between a haunted shopping mall and an alternate dimension he dubs "Shit Narnia."  Even the side characters — though often hazy, due to their limited screen-time — reveal Wong's discerning eye for small town eccentricities, and I suspect that JDATE will be far more poignant to anyone who grew up in a middle-of-nowhere suburban dive.  The voice and tone are perfect for capturing this secondary source of horror and humor, one that acts as an undercurrent to the main story — that sense of going nowhere in a place that you truly can't stand, of having no options.  It mirrors John and Dave's confrontations with evil itself — they are not heroes, they are not on an adventure, and the best they can manage is to dodge every life-threatening encounter in time for their next shift at the local video rental store.

With such subject matter, it would have been easy for Wong to render his plot as silly and inconsequential, but the drama here is often poignant — there's an unrelenting sense of danger and dread, of hopelessness and futility, even if Wong scripts a few too many Shock and Awe moments into the proceedings.  Some may find the rapidly escalating plot in JDATE overly surreal and confusing, but I believe its wild ambition to be the reason the novel resonates so well.  Wong doesn't stop with the usual sampled staples of supernatural horror: ghosts and arbitrary Christian iconography.  Those elements are there, but they're brought into a universe much vaster in scope, tied to a conspiratorial narrative that's only superficially similar to the basic "demon wants to invade earth" structure.

John Dies At the End isn't perfect, of course.  Even with its unique, possibly alienating approach to an already narrow genre, it's a messy, flawed book, though not in a particularly negative way.  Shouldn't horror — especially of this scope, with this voice, with multiple levels of Unreliable Narrator — be a little messy, anyway?  Nonetheless, it is often apparent that Wong's book was written in segments, despite many edits and additions.  The pacing is consistently relentless, but if you think too hard about how some of the plot elements go together, things start to get a little confusing.  I'd much rather read fiction that overreaches than an author playing it safe and predictable, so I don't hold it against Wong.  There's nothing particularly tidy or safe about the narrative voice to begin with — John Dies At the End deserves abundant praise for realizing that dumb, flippant humor can exist without dragging the whole story down to the same level, and Wong is anything but lazy with his ambitions.  The result is a real bender — clever, original, both exciting and disturbing.  It gets in your head — an achievement that should never be overlooked or discredited, no matter the methods.