Building One’s Story

It cannot be denied that American literature is a vast landscape. While relatively younger than other established world literature such as Japanese, Chinese, and British literature, American literature has established itself as a literary powerhouse. Under this huge umbrella, several subgenres exist. American literature has also produced some of the most recognized and most-studied literary pieces, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Harper S. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, among others. These works have transcended time and remain relevant in the contemporary.

The United States has a long tradition of producing writers with top-notch storytelling and writing skills. It is their capabilities that made them rise to global prominence and patronage. Apart from the aforementioned, the United States boasts writers such as Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Mitchell, and Louisa May Alcott. Some of these writers, such as Toni Morrison, Louise Glück, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Pearl S. Buck, and Ernest Hemingway were awarded by the Swedish Academy with the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature, long considered as the pinnacle of a literary career. Their bodies of work have received accolades from across the world.

Another American writer who has made his mark in the world of literature is Paul Auster. Born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, Paul Benjamin Auster rose from obscurity to become one of the most highly-heralded contemporary American writers. Before commencing a full-time career as a writer, he moved to Paris in 1970 after completing his bachelor of arts and master’s degree at Columbia University. In Paris, he worked as a translator of French literature while, at the same time, publishing his poems and essays in American journals. His 1982 memoir, The Invention of Solitude was warmly received by critics and readers alike. However, it was his second book, The New York Trilogy that made him a household name.

“No one was to blame for what happened, but that does not make it any less difficult to accept. It was all a matter of missed connections, bad timing, blundering in the dark. We were always in the right place at the wrong time, the wrong place at the right time, always just missing each other, always just a few inches from figuring the whole thing out. That’s what the story boils down to, I think. A series of lost chances. All the pieces were there from the beginning, but no one knew how to put them together.”

~ Paul Auster, Moon Palace

Auster’s status as one of America’s most promising writers was further consolidated by his succeeding works. Among these works was Moon Palace. Published in 1989, the novel charted the story of Marco Stanley Fogg, also known as M.S.; it was Fogg who narrated his story in the form of a flashback. Fogg’s present was the year 1986, roughly fifteen years after the events his writing covered ended. Fogg was born shortly after the war but his story commenced when he was already eighteen years old. The year was 1965 and he recently moved to New York City to study at Columbia University. At Columbia, he lived in a college dormitory; all out-of-town freshmen were required to live on campus. Following the end of the semester, Fogg moved to his own apartment where he lived for the next three years, “right up to the moment when I finally hit bottom.”

Going through the motion of storytelling, Fogg provided glimpses of his childhood through summaries and snatches of memories. Stanley was the son of Emily Fogg who died in a car accident when she was only 29 years old. M.S. was only eleven years old back then. With the identity of his father a mystery, Stanley then moved in with his Uncle Victor, Emily’s brother. Victor was forty-three years old and was described as a spindly, beak-nosed bachelor. Earning a living as a traveling clarinetist who was once a member of the famous Cleveland Orchestra, he singlehandedly raised his nephew until M.S. attended a boarding school in Chicago. Uncle and nephew soon developed a tight relationship built on mutual respect. Victor treated his nephew like a friend while Stanley liked his uncle’s easy-going personality.

Unfortunately, Victor passed away shortly before Stanley completed his degree. Victor’s death also left his nephew without either family or friends. Victor, however, did leave his nephew a small fortune which Stanley used to settle his uncle’s funeral expenses. Along with this amount, Victor bequeathed Stanley his personal collection of books, a treasure trove of 1,492 books. His uncle’s death left a gaping hole in M.S. He turned into an introvert. The books that his uncle left him, still packed in unopened cartons, became pieces of furniture. It was only when he started recovering from his grief that he started reading the books his uncle left him. Once he was done reading the books, he sold them as his financial situation was becoming dire. When he was expelled from his apartment, he lived temporarily in Central Park.

Despite the destitution that wrapped itself around his shoulders, Stanley slowly got the hang of living in Central Park. He found comfort in his solitude. He was able to navigate life sustained only by what he picked up and scavenged. A keen observer of quotidian life at Central Park, Stanley was a witness to different instances which made him believe again in humanity. At the same time, he also witnessed the ugly side of humanity and of destitution. When an abrupt change in weather left him ill, M.S. was forced to seek shelter in a secluded cave. Just when he was on the cusp of death, M.S. was rescued by an old college friend, David Zimmer, and a young Chinese dancer, Kitty Wu. To help his friend recover, health-wise and financial-wise, Zimmer let Stanley stay at his place and paid for all the expenses.

““As I sold off my books, my apartment went through many changes. That was inevitable, for each time I opened another box, I simultaneously destroyed another piece of furniture. My bed was dismantled, my chairs shrank and disappeared, my desk atrophied into empty space. My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness. Each time I ventured into my uncle’s past, it produced a physical result, an effect in the real world. The consequences were therefore always before my eyes, and there was no way to escape them.”

~ Paul Auster, Moon Palace

Stanley’s story also had overtones of romance. Once he was able to recover, he started working as a French translator which led to him crossing paths again with Kitty. With Zimmer’s prodding, Stanley pursued Kitty who was also in love with Stanley. Stanley then moved out of Zimmer’s apartment but he still needed money. Answering a newspaper advertisement, Stanley found himself the companion to Thomas Effing, an aging, blind, and disabled but curmudgeon of a man. Among Stanley’s roles were reading books to Effing and driving him around New York. Effing also shared his own story with Stanley; Stanley was originally hired to write an obituary for Effing. Effing claimed that during his prime, he was a renowned painter Julian Barber. Circumstances forced him to change identities.

The time with Effing was a point of unraveling for Stanley. Effing became Stanley’s life coach and also his tormentor. It was while working with Effing that Stanley started unpeeling the layers that shrouded his identity. He learned more about his family, in particular the identity of his father. Identity and missing fathers were seminal elements in the novel. Stanley was hounded by the real identity of his father; he was once upset when he did not know who his real father was. His father was a missing piece. In turn, Stanley’s own father was unaware of his own father’s identity. He was also not aware that he had a son. He even wrote a book about a life without a father.

As if to underline the theme related to identities, names play a subtle but critical role in the story. When Victory was cultivating his nephew’s view of the world, he iterated that names possess power. Marco Stanely Fogg was a prime example. Marco was from Marco Polo while his last name was derived from another renowned literary character, Phileas Fogg, the primary character in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eight Days. Both Marco Polo and Phileas Fogg share a similarity: they are both explorers and travelers. The former was an Italian explorer who reached China through the Silk Road while the latter traveled around the world. Marco’s last name was originally Fogelmann but was changed to Fog by the American immigration department; the second “g” was eventually added.

The primary character’s name was, in itself, an indicator that journeys, both internal and physical, abounded in the story. The manifestation of the internal journey captured how Stanley and his father were on personal odysseys to unmask the identity of their own father’s identity. This, in turn, developed into individual journeys to learn more about their own identities. Physical journeys take the readers across New York and even to Paris. Effing, during his youth, ventured into the Utah wilderness to escape his fate. When Stanley found himself yet again in a personal dilemma related to decisions he had to make, he undertook another journey, now to the American Southwest. In a way, it was a coming of full circle as Stanley found himself where he was at the start: alone. Elsewhere the novel grappled with discourses on literature and the arts, mental health, and some darker subjects such as being pro-choice or pro-life and power structures.

“My moods charged recklessly from one extreme to another, shunting me between joy and despair so often that my mind became battered from the journey. Almost anything could set off the switch: a sudden confrontation with the past, a chance smile from a stranger, the way the light fell on the sidewalk at any given hour. I struggled to achieve some equilibrium within myself, but it was no use: everything was instability, turmoil, outrageous whim. At one moment I was engaged in a philosophical quest, supremely confident that I was about to join the ranks of the illuminati; at the next moment I was in tears, collapsing under the weight of my own anguish. My self-absorption was so intense that I could no longer see things for what they were: objects became thoughts, and every thought was part of the drama being played out inside me.”

~ Paul Auster, Moon Palace

The novel’s wonderful elements were woven together by Auster’s lush and engrossing writing. Interestingly, Moon Palace – the book’s title traces its provenance from a Chinese restaurant in New York – was built on implausible scenarios. The story was built on coincidences. It was also peopled with characters who come across as mere caricatures. But despite this quality, they were characters who still commanded affection because they were imbued with virtues and sins common people can relate to. Their struggles also kept them grounded. This can be attributed to the fact that the story mirrored several elements from the writer’s own life. It made the story more intimate. For instance, both Stanley and Auster were born in the same year and they both had a childhood sans a father. The absentee father is also a recurring theme in Auster’s oeuvre.

Moon Palace is a story of coincidences, some were absurd while some were sad. In between was a healthy dose of exuberance. These scenarios made up for a compelling book that grappled with a plethora of subjects such as family dynamics, the life of being an orphan, and even solitude. It is also about the complexities of father and son relationships, the intricacies of finding one’s identity, and personal odysseys. These were all integrated into a rich tapestry that also featured stories within stories. For all the struggles that Marco Stanley Fogg had to go through, the novel reverberated with hopeful messages. It was a heartwarming and exuberant novel that provided a deep insight into the writer’s own body of work. This picaresque novel was also a glimpse into the writer himself.

Book Specs

Author: Paul Auster
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Publishing Date: 1989
Number of Pages: 307
Genre: Literary, Picaresque

Synopsis

‘It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened when I got there.’

So begins the mesmerizing narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg – orphan, child of the sixties, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story – a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West.

Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco’s search – for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origins and his fate.

In Moon Palace, Paul Auster manages to combine the excitement of a Wild West novel with the allegorical strangeness of a work by Kafka. As in his previous books, Auster’s skill s a writer and the sheer scope of his imagination astound and inspire.

About the Author

To learn more about Paul Auster, click here.