Alas, Paul Auster has fallen short this time.
If it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment which doesn’t work. We start off with Miles Heller, a man in his twenties running away from his past, and earning money by clearing away stuff people have left in repossessed houses. He likes to take photos of the things he’s left behind. I thought that was going somewhere, but I think Auster forgot about it.
Miles is forced to return to New York, and we end up reading chapters from the perspective of each of the housemates he is squatting with, as well as his estranged father.
It’s a novel chockful of Austeresque concerns, and yet it spreads way too thin without adequately developing any of them. To tell all the stories he begins in this novel, he would need to write a 900 page tome.
I wish Auster would finish what he starts. In many of the books he’s published in this flurry of the last ten years, he disrupts the narrative unnecessarily. If he achieved something by doing this, then by all means he should. But I feel that generally he has achieved very little.
I can’t generalise too much here; certain kinds of disruptions are part of Auster’s magic, but now they’re stopping him telling the story which seemed to be burning bright in his mind at first. (And yet in his previous novel, Invisible, I felt the frame narrative actually worked well.)
Side note: in almost every Auster novel, he features a protagonist who was born in 1947, his own year of birth. In this novel, it is Miles’s father who was born in that year. He’s moved onto the next generation; most of the characters are his children’s age.
Concluding note: it was enjoyable enough to read, especially when each chapter is taken on its own. Auster gets a chance to write at length about baseball, luck, loneliness and reconciliation. It just all adds up to less than it should.

I hate advertising. A horrendous billboard has just gone up above the cinema near my house proclaiming ‘Pack More Into Your Mornings: Botica’s Bunch, Mix 94.5FM’. It has a photo of the bunch in question, a predictably middle-of-the-road threesome guaranteed to appeal to the broadest possible number of people.

But that phrase ‘pack more into your mornings’ irks me. What the hell does it mean? Pack more inane banter? Pack more lousy jokes? Pack more jokes about the differences between the sexes, about whose football team won, about celebrities? I don’t know, I haven’t listened, but I can imagine. If you really wanted to pack more into your mornings, you’d listen to Radio National, and be treated to in depth analysis of every political development over the past twenty-four hours. (A bit much for me, yet I keep doing it.) Imagine if there were billboards promoting Radio National instead of Mix FM?

Or imagine if instead of billboards and bus shelter ads trying to convince me to switch brands or spend more money, there was public art? Imagine every place you see advertising there was something meaningful or beautiful or both? Why the hell are we living like this?

Our culture is built around all these false dichotomies between almost identical options. Listen to 96FM or listen to 94.5FM. Watch the Today show or Sunrise, both with news, weather, celebrities, Hollywood gossip, quirky stories, live crosses. Watch Channel 7 News or watch Channel 9 news, Today Tonight or A Current Affair. Barrack for the Eagles or the Dockers… how can people seriously have arguments about football? Do they really think there is something intrinsically different about their football team in these days of nationalisation, of player trading and corporate sport, largely disconnected from place and community? Choose Hoyts or choose EVENT cinemas; when you get there choose the generic action movie or chickflick or comedy or drama of your choice, depending on the negotiation between you and your partner, because of course women like one sort of film and men like another type of film. Vote for Liberal, or vote for Labor, depending on whose hairstyle you like the best, according to who the media’s told you is better.

These are not true choices. We’re stuck on the surface, and I blame that damned billboard looming above the Windsor Cinema on Stirling Highway.

An intelligent discussion about the vilificaiton of the bogan appeared on Fairfax news sites today. It argues that bogans are the one group it’s considered acceptable to sneer at, and discusses jealousy as part of the motivation. I feel slightly mortified, but I’m not going to stop reading Things Bogans Like. Sneering is wrong but the fact is that crassness dominates Australia, and I don’t think it’s a good thing. The bogans may be vilified by the ‘cultural elite’, but boganism is regrettably dominant in our society. It is right to identify and discuss boganism because it is the mainstream, it is the assumed values of suburbia, it is commerical tv.