Why the Surface of Paul Auster's Moon Palace Is Cratered and Uneven.
At the outset, it seems Auster would like it if the hero of his story, one M.S. Fogg, had grown up without parents or any kind. His mother dies when he is nine, totally mum about who his father is. The care of M.S. falls to Uncle Victor, who, to his credit, saves the pay-off from his mother’s law-suit settlement (she died in a bus accident, a completely innocent victim.) and uses that money for his nephew’s education. M.S. Fogg grows up without a father, cared for by a loving uncle, and attends Colombia University.
Not a word is mentioned about M.S. ever having missed growing up without a father; or, after the age of nine, without a mother. Rather, M.S. Fogg is drawn as if he grew up on the moon where no child ever has a father, and where every child grows up with a loving uncle. That’s an old trick of Dickens, passed down to me by John Irving: If you write about a child growing up with marked deprivations who never complains about those deprivations, and who, in spite of them, grows up to be quite successful, that character will capture the reader’s heart.
Our story opens in earnest when M.S. makes his way to New York City and attends Colombia University. By then his Uncle Victor has given him his legacy, his “inheritance,” his library of 1,492 books. He gives it to his nephew at this point in the story because Uncle Victor, a musician, is about to leave on a nationwide tour, and must downsize his belongings.
(Hints are dropped along the way: 1,492 books: Might that have something to do with Christopher Columbus? And might that have something to do with the institution M.S. is attending, Colombia University?)
BTW, in real life, Paul Auster was a 1969 graduate of Colombia University.
Lucky, for M.S. Fogg, his Uncle Victor’s legacy is packed away in a great many boxes. So, because M.S. has no use right then for a bunch of books, he puts his legacy, which, of course, by extension becomes our legacy (Western Thought, Enlightenment, etc.) to work in his life in a highly creative and visual way
“As it turned out, the boxes were quite useful to me in that state.” (i.e., packed away in boxes). “The apartment on 112th Street was unfurnished, and rather than just squander my funds on things I did not want and could not afford, I converted the boxes into several pieces of ‘imaginary furniture.’ It was a little like working on a puzzle: grouping the cartons into various modular configurations… One set of sixteen served as the supports for my mattress, another set of twelve became a table....”
You get the idea. Well, because this delightful writing appeared on a page two of the novel, and because in reading the rest of the three-hundred-page novel nowhere else did I find any visual concept even approaching the sheer brilliance of that one, I made the mistake of falling in love with the delightfulness of Paul Auster’s writing on page two.
Advice to just-starting-out writers: Always lead with your strongest material. Of course, most young writers don’t know what their strongest material is. Obviously, Auster had no problem discerning it. He led with it and I took the bait.
Over the course of the next three-hundred-page novel, I learned I had committed a serious mistake which opened me to a world of hurt later on.
By the end of part one of our novel, M.S. Fogg, what we, by now, assume is the stand-in for the author, is going broke at the same time as he’s graduating from Colombia. In part two of the story, instead of using his college diploma to help him find a job—having no intention of working for a living—he becomes homeless in New York City. His salvation is living and sleeping in Central Park.
Unfortunately, by then I had become quixotically attracted to M.S. Fogg, who, frankly, reminded me of myself, when I first lived in New York. (Last month I described my “wild night” in NYC’s Central Park.) Was I something of a fatalist? Something of an idiot? Well, yes. In the fog (Get it? M.S Fogg?) of my first blush with adulthood, I still insist I was searching for a more authentic self, which had all the earmarks of a spoiled adolescent stamping his feet, insisting that without a job he would found a way to live “more authentically.”
Perhaps that was the origin of my fatal attraction to the first and second parts of Moon Palace. By the end of the second part, M.S. Fogg has turned into a total bum rifling through garbage cans in Central Park, subsisting off discarded half-eaten meals of middle-class folks. And this is our lovely M.S. Fogg who months earlier has graduated from Colombia University. Now we see how far he’s fallen.
Here's another Central Park true story: By 1971, Carrie and I lived on West 87th Street off Central Park West in our first home. I was working then at an advertising agency just off East 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. Every morning I would ride my three-speed bicycle to and from work. I would cut through the Park at 72nd Street and make my way both south and east, riding my bike along the wondering, deserted pathways that snaked through Central Park, rejoining city streets on 59th Street just west of Fifth Avenue by Bergdorf-Goodman, adjacent to The Plaza. One morning I was cutting though the park as I normally would, when suddenly I found myself confronted by a rather large—fat by all appearances—New York City rat sitting to one side of the same sidewalk on which I intended to ride my bicycle. I stopped and waited for the imposture to vacate the premises. He didn’t. In fact, when I refused to retreat, he bared his teeth at me. Yes, I was being threatened by a New York City rat. “Well, tough shit, Buddy,” I thought. I refused to move. “This is my sidewalk.” The standoff ended a moment later when the rat came to his senses and retreated. You see? I was a pissed-off New Yorker. And, look how far I’ve come over the course of my long life? Now I’m a pissed-off Texan. Talk about power-grabs by the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Just be careful of the rats.
Anyway, the rest of Moon Palace was nowhere as important to me, nor as enticingly written as parts one and two of the novel were. By the time our Colombia University graduate gets a day-job and meets the man who eventually he will learn is his grandfather—and then later in the novel, his father, the same person his mother refused identify, I was I was no longer as emotionally involved as no doubt the author expected we readers to be.
I was also no longer as enchanted with the novel as I was at first. The rest of the novel is nowhere as enchantingly written.
Why is that? I think it’s because our hero M.S. Fogg never had to work hard to find out who his grandfather and father is. It’s all simply revealed to him—by chance—so by that point in the novel, I wasn’t nearly as involved in the story as I would have been had Fogg had to struggle and work it out on his own. He never had to overcome the odds. And that’s what was missing for me. Also the rest of the novel wasn’t written nearly as imaginatively as the first third. In my opinion, these are my most important understandings about Moon Palace. And that is why I’m boldfacing these words: As readers, we discount what our hero never has to work hard to attain. And, Dear Reader, does that not that resemble real life?
Anyway, now you know why my walk on Paul Auster’s Moon was a little rough; and why I found its surface uneven. But then I never tried to play miniature golf on the moon. Maybe I should have? But then, I don’t believe I’ll ever revisit Moon Palace again.