The subject of lost loved ones and all that follows in the wake of such a loss is hardly unusual in contemporary literature, but Paul Auster's Baumgartner is a worthy addition to the body of fiction that treats the subject. It's a well-drawn portrait of a man wrestling with grief, and a sensitive character study that displays many of the qualities for which Auster's been lauded in a long literary career.
The protagonist in this compact novel is S.T. ("Sy") Baumgartner, a professor of philosophy for more than 30 years at Princeton University, specializing in the field of phenomenology. Some 10 years after his wife Anna Blume's freak drowning during their Cape Cod vacation, he lives alone in the house they once shared. He's so desperate for human contact that he orders books he never intends to read, only for the brief daily encounter they guarantee with the UPS delivery driver, Molly. Even now, Baumgartner "marvels at how little has changed for him since those early months of near insanity" following Anna's death, ones in which he poured her a mug of coffee every morning and hallucinated about conversations with her, even though he's produced two books since her passing and is working on a third.
Baumgartner's story is revealed in episodic fashion and with precise, observant, and sometimes touching detail, including his halting attempt to revive his romantic life with a fellow professor named Judith. As he's done in novels like The Book of Illusions, Auster (Bloodbath Nation; Report from the Interior) embeds stories into the main narrative. In this case, some appear in the form of fragments of memoir written by Anna, a talented translator and poet, a collection of whose poems Baumgartner arranged to publish posthumously.
But it's the news that Beatrix Coen, a graduate student from the University of Michigan, wants to write her Ph.D. thesis on Anna's work that holds out the promise of permanently lifting Baumgartner out of his lingering grief. He imagines Anna and the much younger Beatrix as the "two bookends of his life," and when she accepts his invitation to move into an apartment above his garage that will serve as the base for her research into Anna's papers, the 71-year-old philosopher comes to anticipate her arrival "like a restless little boy counting down the days until school lets out for the summer."
The novel's ambiguous ending may not be satisfying to some, but it's consistent with the themes and tone of what has gone before. S.T. Baumgartner isn't the sort of character most people will encounter in everyday life, but, as Auster has created him, that doesn't detract from his appeal, or make his story any less poignant. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: In this poignant 18th novel from Paul Auster, a man wrestles with his grief 10 years after the loss of his beloved wife.