PEARL K.
BELL
489
finally demonstrates is that illness, alas, is no joke.
There is an hallucinatory haze over much of Paul Auster 's fiction,
even when he seems to be concentrating on ordinary, prosaic, perfectly
familiar experience.
In
the three novels that comprise
Th e New York
Trilogy
(which has been described as an abstract detective story), in the
more recent
Moon Palace,
about an orphaned student's search for a father,
Auster was intrigued by the enigma and mystery that lurk beneath the
commonplace and the everyday, the violent and unaccountable havoc
that chance and accident can wreak on seemingly unremarkable lives.
Crimes are unspecified and unsolved, ominous symbols swoop and dart in
and out of his pages but remain inscrutable, and nothing and no one are
what they may at first appear to be.
Auster's new novel,
The Music of Chance,7
is
to
some extent a
change of pace. It is tightly plotted, and the fate of its principal charac–
ters is made hideously clear. His unadorned prose is taut and vigorous.
But his obsession with the random workings of fate is as strong as ever,
and the story is dominated, as before, by strangely disordered
personalities.
The main figure is a young Boston firefighter, Jim Nashe, around
whose head the tiles have been whirling. His wife has left him, his child is
being raised by relatives, and his life is out of sync. Unexpectedly he
comes into a sizable inheritance, and suddenly, ensnared by "some name–
less agitation," he quits his job, buys an expensive new ca r, and begins
crisscrossing the country in a purposeless marathon without a destination:
"He was like a crazed animal, careening blindly from one nowhere to
the next. ... That nightlong rush through the emptiness, that rumbling
of the road along his skin.... As long as he was driving, he carried no
burdens, was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former
life." The Saab becomes an extension of his body, and he of the car's.
As Nashe keeps driving from nowhere to nowhere, he worries
about his sinking nest egg. One day, on impulse, he picks up a punk
gambler, Pozzi (an echo of Beckett's Pozza in
Waiting for Codot?),
who
needs a large stake for a poker game he's arranged with two weird mil–
lionaires, winners of an enormous jackpot in the lottery (more workings
of chance). Nashe hands over the money - "It was as if he finally had no
part in what was about to happen to him" - and when Pozzi loses it all,
he and Nashe become the prisoners of their hosts, who are not only
crazy but vicious. It all ends disastrously, as we can easily foresee .
The Music of Chance
has been described by its publisher as a parable,
7771e M£t5ic of Chalice.
By
Paul Auster. Viking. $18.95.
