The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Timbuktu by Paul Auster
Thomas Hove

Paul Auster. Timbuktu. Henry Holt, 1999. 181 pp. $22.00.

After the awkward experiments in narrative voice perpetrated in Mr.Vertigo (1994), Auster is close to getting back on track in this novel told from the point of view of an aging dog named Mr. Bones, whose fate we follow through three masters. His original master is Willy G. Christmas, a homeless poet who models himself after Santa Claus and takes Mr. Bones wandering through America. After losing Willy in Baltimore, Mr. Bones befriends a Chinese-American boy named Henry, who teaches him that “love is not a quantifiable substance . . . and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.” Chased away by Henry’s father, Mr. Bones wanders into Virginia, where he ingratiates himself to a generic white suburban family named the Joneses, who rename him, with appropriate banality, Sparky. The Timbuktu of the title refers to Willy’s vision of the afterlife, and Mr. Bones’s tale ends with him abjuring the comforts of the Joneses and attempting to rejoin his fellow economic and social outcast Willy in the far-off land of justice and equality.
The first half of Timbuktu is marred by Willy’s annoying, extended, freeassociative monologues, which don’t work because their po-mo clutter and wordplay fail to enhance the novel’s thematic content and because Auster can’t reproduce varieties of American speech as well as writers like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, or William Gaddis. But in the second half, Auster’s usual spare, transparent narrative style predominates, recalling that of earlier works like The Music of Chance (1990) and his masterpiece Leviathan (1992). Although Timbuktu doesn’t have the compelling narrative thrust of those novels, nor the sustained uncanniness of Kafka’s great “Investigations of a Dog,” its canine narrator offers many poignant and humane reflections on the hidden economic and psychological injuries that blight contemporary American life. [Thomas Hove]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Timbuktu by Paul Auster Thomas Hove Paul Auster. Timbuktu. Henry Holt, 1999. 181 pp. $22.00. After the awkward experiments in narrative voice perpetrated in Mr.Vertigo (1994), Auster is close to getting back on track in this novel told from the point of view of an aging dog named Mr. Bones, whose fate we follow through three masters. His original master is Willy G. Christmas, a homeless poet who models himself after Santa Claus and takes Mr. Bones wandering through America. After losing Willy in Baltimore, Mr. Bones befriends a Chinese-American boy named Henry, who teaches him that “love is not a quantifiable substance . . . and even after one love had been lost, it was by no means impossible to find another.” Chased away by Henry’s father, Mr. Bones wanders into Virginia, where he ingratiates himself to a generic white suburban family named the Joneses, who rename him, with appropriate banality, Sparky. The Timbuktu of the title refers to Willy’s vision of the afterlife, and Mr. Bones’s tale ends with him abjuring the comforts of the Joneses and attempting to rejoin his fellow economic and social outcast Willy in the far-off land of justice and equality. The first half of Timbuktu is marred by Willy’s annoying, extended, freeassociative monologues, which don’t work because their po-mo clutter and wordplay fail to enhance the novel’s thematic content and because Auster can’t reproduce varieties of American speech as well as writers like Don DeLillo, Ralph Ellison, or William Gaddis. But in the second half, Auster’s usual spare, transparent narrative style predominates, recalling that of earlier works like The Music of Chance (1990) and his masterpiece Leviathan (1992). Although Timbuktu doesn’t have the compelling narrative thrust of those novels, nor the sustained uncanniness of Kafka’s great “Investigations of a Dog,” its canine narrator offers many poignant and humane reflections on the hidden economic and psychological injuries that blight contemporary American life. [Thomas Hove]

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