The Locked Room by Paul Auster
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I know this guy who used to be a poet. He told me about how he would go to these writer’s retreats, and sit around with other poets who would just blather on, all these anecdotes meant to pre-inform their poetry. And he hated it. And I hated The Locked Room.
Because I feel like City of Glass and Ghosts where just blatherings setting up icons in The Locked Room. There’s the various names of people, the various artifacts. Graves and Alice in Wonderland and red notebooks. Borrowing an overcoat might be a metaphor for something, at the reader’s discretion. But when it’s mentioned in one story and then another, the reader no longer has a choice. And as a reader, I do not want the author telling me what to think.
This is not a screed affirming “show don’t tell.” I don’t even want the author to show me anything, not on purpose any way. Just write your damns story. I’ll find meaning in it if I want to. The Locked Room is so damned Freudian, and I mean that pejoratively. The main character has sex with his child-hood friends wife—and it’s angry sex! Bullshit.
The only part of The Locked Room—or the entire New York Trilogy, for that mattered—that I found the least interesting was Fanshawe’s sister. Finally, I thought, a part of the story leaked through and not “expertly crafted” as a symbol of something. That is, until the sentence: “Ellen is no more than a literary device.” I gnashed my teeth. I decided that no, Auster must have realized that she’d leaked in, and so he came to grips with his lack of control by shoving in that sentence. Ha.
Whatever. I’m done with the novel(s) now, and I can move on to middle-class meaninglessness. Fiction forwarded by cognitive dissonance, existential angst held at arm’s length and not propped-up by so-called Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism can bite my ass.