Man in the Dark is a novel with several story threads. The hero August Brill is a seventy-two year old accomplished writer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic. He is living in Vermont with his divorced daughter Miriam and widowed granddaughter Katya. He recently had a car accident that left his leg crippled and put him in a wheelchair. In addition, he hasn’t gotten over his wife Sonia’s death.

All three people in the house suffer from loneliness, inability to face life, and feelings of guilt although some of that guilt is misplaced. As insomnia rules his nights, Brill tells himself stories to make the time pass.

The inside story of the novel is in Brill’s middle-of-the-night story where a young man, Owen Brick, finds himself trapped in a deep, twelve-foot-diameter hole. He has no idea how he got there. Then, someone takes him out and burdens him with a mission to assassinate the creator of war, the civil war created in Brill's mind. At this time of warped reality, NewYork has started the civil war, and the 2000 elections have led to the secession of many states from the United States. George W Bush is the head of the Federal States, and a prime minister rules the other side. NewYork Yankees dance at the Radio City Music Hall, and the Rockettes are the baseball team. 9/11 has not happened, and the twin towers are still standing.

Owen Brick, however, is not a murderer, and he does everything in his power to avoid what it is thrown at him. Although this second story hints at the idea of US in war with itself and the workings of Brill’s writer-mind at work, the depth of the story is in the characters of Brill and his granddaughter, when at the end each urge each other to face their demons.

Written with an outlook akin to that of the existentialists, Man in the Dark may disturb some readers for its choppy way of jumping from one story to another; however, old people’s minds work like that, with difficulty of keeping to the idea or task at hand, and some readers may have a hard time understanding the reality the author is showing to the readers. A character named Lou Brick in the civil war story inside Brill's mind explains this as: “There is no single reality, Corporal. There are many realities. There is no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world.”

the depth of feeling in the characters in Brill's real story.

read other books by Paul Auster.

Paul Auster has had many successes in the different forms of media. His other books are: Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, The Red Notebook: True Stories, I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project, Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure, Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan, The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things, The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, The Invention of Solitude, and Squeeze Play.

I loved the layering of the storytelling, the depth in the story’s many themes, and the author’s courage and skill of confronting what may be absurd yet true. This is not a book one would read for titillation or even for the story, but for the truths that surface from the abyss of the human psyche and the commotion of our time.

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Created Feb 12, 2009 at 8:09pm • Submit your own review...