Three-quarters of the way through Paul Auster’s new novel, his protagonist, Sy Baumgartner, pushes aside Mysteries of the Wheel, the book he’s been working on, and starts writing an account of a trip he took to Ukraine in 2017. The story is called The Wolves of Stanislav, and it involves Baumgartner travelling into “the bloodlands of Eastern Europe, the central horror-zone of 20th-century slaughter”.
Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered here by the Nazis between 1941 and 1943, and if his grandfather hadn’t left, Baumgartner would never have been born. He seeks information about his family from a local rabbi and is told that Auster was a common name among the Jews of Stanislav.
So, Auster sends his fictional character in search of the history of a family called Auster. This interweaving of material forms the substance of Baumgartner. It’s a roughly textured blend of story and ostensible non-fiction, a narrative fusion mingling unfinished manuscripts, poems, autobiographical details, musings, jottings, anecdotes of a long marriage and reflections on an intellectual and writing life.
Sy Baumgartner is in his 70s, alone and still grieving the death of his wife. Anna was a writer and translator who drowned 10 years earlier, aged 58 when a rogue wave broke her back. Sy is so lonely he has fallen in love with the UPS courier and taken to ordering books he doesn’t want so he can talk to her when she delivers them.
In a series of domestic catastrophes, Sy burns a pot and scalds his hand. He receives a message that his cleaner’s husband has been injured in an accident, meaning she won’t be available that day. A meter reader knocks at the door, and soon Sy is tripping on his basement steps and crashing down on to the hard concrete floor.
Just when it seems we’re in for something sinister and claustrophobic (who is the strange meter reader at the top of the stairs?) Auster sends Sy into a reverie about the burnt pot, in which he remembers his first meeting with Anna. The novel is full of these swerves and reversals, subverting expectation as it follows, without much attention to structure or form, Sy’s reminiscences and melancholy ruminations.
It’s messy and uneven, yet highly readable. Auster is not a great prose stylist, and the tone veers towards the homely, hokey and cute. There’s “lickety-split”, “discombobulated”, “ponders whether to pop Ed in the snout”.
The novel packs a lot in. We get Sy’s early history, as well as the story of his decades-long marriage, interwoven with his poignant attempts to make a new life. He is stuck, marooned in grief, until one night when he dreams the phone in the downstairs study is ringing. He answers, and hears his dead wife on the line. The surreal encounter frees him to begin looking for a new companion, and so we meet Judith, “a significant someone in the film world”, and Beatrix, a young woman who wants to write a thesis on Anna’s poems.
There is much preoccupation with ageing and death, and with fate. Auster’s 2017 novel, 4321, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, portrayed four different versions of one person’s life, each an outcome of chance and luck. Here, a similar meditation on the randomness of life also tackles the trickiness of memory. Baumgartner’s story of the apocryphal wolves of Stanislav ends with the question: “What to believe when you can’t be sure whether a supposed fact is true or not?”
Auster answers the question for him, and it sounds like a satisfying affirmation of his life and art: “In the absence of any information that could confirm or deny the story he told me, I choose to believe the poet. And whether they were there or not, I choose to believe in the wolves.”
