Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: 'Leviathan': Whale of a tragic tale Date: Tue, 27 Oct 92 13:27:07 EST Message-ID: \SE E;LIFE;THE READ \HD 'Leviathan': Whale of a tragic tale \BY Sean Piccoli \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES A chance meeting in a strange place. The discovery that two people have a friend in common. Paul Auster makes more of such coincidences than mere oddity. In his latest novel, "Leviathan," coincidence furnishes both timer and fuse for a bomb that eventually goes off in the face of the book's protagonist, a gifted but troubled writer named Benjamin Sachs. Within this strange and moving story, "Leviathan" is the title of a novel that Sachs begins but never finishes once he gets tangled in a string of luckless events - all of them improbable but, as the story progresses, somehow inevitable. Led on by impulse and chance, Sachs is transformed from an eccentric scribe to a murder suspect and, finally, a fugitive who takes to blowing up copies of the Statue of Liberty in towns across the country. Sachs dies in his chosen line of work, blown to bits on a roadside patch of grass somewhere in Wisconsin while sitting next to his car, building one of his bombs. Which is where "Leviathan" begins, with the book's narrator, Peter Aaron, reading about Sachs' death in a two-paragraph dispatch buried inside the New York Times. The discovery prompts him to write Sachs' story, to counter the lies he fears others will tell about this complicated man. Aaron borrows the title of his dead friend's unfinished novel. So "Leviathan" is cast as a tale within a tale, a real book about a fictional author trying to uncover and make sense of everything that brought his friend to that road in Wisconsin. Mr. Auster is writing not a little about the struggle to write. The tragedy begins with Aaron's former lover, an artist named Maria Turner who makes a pastime of spying on strangers. It is her obsession with other people's lives that gets the ball rolling in Sachs' direction. One spring morning in 1976, she finds a small address book on a Manhattan sidewalk. She sees in its contents an opportunity for her most ambitious bit of sleuthing yet. Maria's address book will turn into a Pandora's Box of regrettable coincidences, pulling complete strangers and long-lost friends together into a circle of events in which "everything is connected to everything else, every story overlaps with every other story." Mr. Auster skillfully peels back all the overlapping folds, laying bare the threads that tie Sachs to those people whose lives will change his own. Usually regarded as a sort of hip abstractionist who favors feeling and impression over plot, the novelist shows plenty of skill as a pure storyteller here. "Leviathan" is meditative in the way of Mr. Auster's earlier books, but sharply executed and rich in characters. We watch Sachs unravel with sorrow and dread. The author never suggests, however, that we are captives of coincidence. Rather, Sachs' story reminds us that chance has a way of testing people: sending signals that play on people's desires; daring them to see in random encounters a hidden hand; leading them to court fortune or disaster. Some may be inclined to read a rebuke of modern society in these pages. Mr. Auster opens "Leviathan," also the title of Thomas Hobbes' epic treatise on government, with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Every actual State is corrupt." He portrays Sachs as a voice drowned out by the sea change in national mood during the Reagan years. But Mr. Auster ultimately treats politics as a useful tool for charting Sachs' woeful course. The author doesn't care whom his characters voted for; he is more interested in their private demons and the way those demons mingle with circumstances to force people together and apart. ***** LEVIATHAN By Paul Auster Viking, $21, 275 pages Sean Piccoli is a writer for the Life section of The Washington Times. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM