The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Red Notebook, by Paul Auster
reviewed by Valerie Ellis

Paul Auster. The Red Notebook. New Directions, 2002. 103 pp. Paper: $10.95.

A recently divorced man recalls his first (and only) true love, a woman he met some twenty years before; three days later she calls him, and they are reunited. A woman doesn’t have the money for an operation her cat desperately needs. While waiting at a stoplight, she’s hit from behind. The cost of the repairs is exactly the amount she needs for the operation. Two friends, one the author’s sister-in-law, both of whom have studied Chinese in Taipei, discover that they have family living on the same street in New York City. As the conversation progresses, they realize that their families not only inhabit the same apartment building, but live on the same floor. These and more comprise the “chain of anecdotes” compiled in The Red Notebook. Auster, the author of ten novels, most recently The Book of Illusions, has been fascinated throughout his writing life with unlikely coincidence and the odd ways in which fate brings people together, and this collection is no exception. These are preoccupations of anyone interested in creating a coherent narrative out of the chaos of life. Indeed, there would be no literature without the urge to organize chance events into narrative. But Auster is more interested in the capriciousness of fate than most. He has said elsewhere that for him the story is primary; that a sentence, no matter how good, falls to the wayside if it isn’t necessary to the story. His clear, lucid prose attests to this conviction, as does the somewhat detached tone with which he suggests that stories are found and not created. There’s a quiet sadness to these stories, a sense that the identities we claim for ourselves are always vulnerable to the vagaries of chance, more fragile than we’d like to believe, but also much more fascinating.