The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure by Paul Auster
Stephen Bernstein

Paul Auster. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. Henry Holt, 1997. 449 pp. $25.00.

This book is an Auster museum: a memoir followed by three appendices of the writer’s early projects. For many Auster enthusiasts the appendices’ three plays, baseball card game, and full-length detective novel may be as interesting as the memoir since they provide useful background to the later fiction that accounts for Auster’s reputation.
The memoir itself is an often funny, self-effacing piece, Auster’s attempt to understand his cash-strapped wanderjahre of the seventies. Acknowledging his early dedication to writing, he shows just how difficult and self-defeating such commitment can be. Along the way there are entertaining accounts of Auster’s various odd jobs and portraits of a number of interesting figures from the period whose paths crossed Auster’s: Jerzy Kosinski, John Lennon, Mary McCarthy, and others. What Auster seems unable to dramatize fully, though, is precisely the subject of his subtitle, early failure. Instead the memoir functions as a study in literary apprenticeship, with its account of poverty never quite coming to life (in part since we are aware of the writer’s subsequent success). That shortcoming is not a serious one, since what many readers want is knowledge of the apprenticeship. In that regard, this text helpfully supplements Auster’s first memoir and the fictions he produced following the apprentice period.
As for the apprentice work, it is just that. One play is the germ of the novel Ghosts, another that of The Music of Chance. The card game suggests the permutational fascination Auster inherits from the Beckett of Watt, while the detective novel displays the dominant motifs of The New York Trilogy. I shudder to think of dissertation chapters extrapolating the subtexts of Action Baseball, but this collection is a welcome picture of Auster’s artistic development. [Stephen Bernstein]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure by Paul Auster Stephen Bernstein Paul Auster. Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. Henry Holt, 1997. 449 pp. $25.00. This book is an Auster museum: a memoir followed by three appendices of the writer’s early projects. For many Auster enthusiasts the appendices’ three plays, baseball card game, and full-length detective novel may be as interesting as the memoir since they provide useful background to the later fiction that accounts for Auster’s reputation. The memoir itself is an often funny, self-effacing piece, Auster’s attempt to understand his cash-strapped wanderjahre of the seventies. Acknowledging his early dedication to writing, he shows just how difficult and self-defeating such commitment can be. Along the way there are entertaining accounts of Auster’s various odd jobs and portraits of a number of interesting figures from the period whose paths crossed Auster’s: Jerzy Kosinski, John Lennon, Mary McCarthy, and others. What Auster seems unable to dramatize fully, though, is precisely the subject of his subtitle, early failure. Instead the memoir functions as a study in literary apprenticeship, with its account of poverty never quite coming to life (in part since we are aware of the writer’s subsequent success). That shortcoming is not a serious one, since what many readers want is knowledge of the apprenticeship. In that regard, this text helpfully supplements Auster’s first memoir and the fictions he produced following the apprentice period. As for the apprentice work, it is just that. One play is the germ of the novel Ghosts, another that of The Music of Chance. The card game suggests the permutational fascination Auster inherits from the Beckett of Watt, while the detective novel displays the dominant motifs of The New York Trilogy. I shudder to think of dissertation chapters extrapolating the subtexts of Action Baseball, but this collection is a welcome picture of Auster’s artistic development. [Stephen Bernstein]

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