Like Auster’s immediately succeeding novel, Moon Palace (1989) is about chance, contingency and possible coincidences. But its interest for me is quite different: it’s a novel that has absent or missing fathers at its heart.

The most recent book by Paul Auster that I’ve read is The Music of Chance (1990). I read it not long after it was published, early in 1991. I had enjoyed his previous two novels, In the Country of Last Things (1987) and Moon Palace (1989) and was a bit surprised to find that I was responding unfavourably to the latest. After 33 years, I don’t remember exactly what it was about The Music of Chance that put me off, but it had something to do with the way the central characters deliberately made their lives, their futures dependent on the outcome of a gamble. I can’t say much more about the theme of chance in that novel, particularly since I remember so little, but I’ll have something to say below about a similar theme in Moon Palace, the novel that this post is about.

It was because I had enjoyed the two earlier books, and particularly Moon Palace, that I had expected to like The Music of Chance more than I did. Until a few weeks ago, when I reread Moon Palace in preparation for writing this post, I had read each of these novels just once. I borrowed In the Country of Last Things from Hackney library, where it had caught my attention with its Faber imprint and the splash of yellow on the otherwise dark cover. A friend had been given The Music of Chance in hardback for his birthday and let me borrow it, after he had read it himself. (It struck me last Sunday, 8 December, that I was reading Moon Palace on what would have been that friend’s 65th birthday, if he hadn’t died in his mid 40s.) But I had my own copy of Moon Palace which I could easily have reread at any time.

When Auster died earlier this year, I was reminded that it was a book I had vaguely meant to return to. A few weeks later, I unexpectedly found my copies of Moon Palace and The Invention of Solitude. I hadn’t been looking for them and I was surprised that I hadn’t left them behind or donated them to a charity shop in the meantime. The obvious thing to do was to reread them both, which I’ve now done.

Moon Palace begins “It was the summer that men first walked on the moon.” I remember that summer rather better than I remember most things from my childhood. My father had just got out of hospital and was convalescing in my maternal aunt’s house in Killiney, County Dublin. (We actually lived in County Sligo in the north-west, a town called Ballymote — or Bally remote to my Dubliner father’s siblings.) The lunar landing took place a week before my 12th birthday.

Less than six months later, on 2 January 1970, my father died. Though it was obvious to me that he had been seriously ill for some time, I really hadn’t been expecting that. I didn’t adjust very well to the loss of my father, though it took me a very long time to acknowledge that fact.

So, reading Moon Palace about 20 years later, I was oblivious to the possibility that the novel’s appeal, so far as I was concerned, lay in its treatment of the absence of fathers. The narrator, Marco Stanley Fogg (known as “M.S.”), a recent graduate of Columbia University, goes to work for a wheelchair-bound octogenarian, Thomas Effing, who lives in a big, old apartment in New York’s Upper West Side. Effing can’t use his legs and seems to be blind, though M.S. has doubts, never entirely resolved, about his lack of vision. Effing requires M.S. to read to him and walk with him. Eventually, Effing seems to tire of being read to and has M.S. begin to write a memoir of part of Effing’s life.

It emerges that “Thomas Effing” is an assumed name. The old man was originally an artist, a landscape painter named Julian Barber, who disappeared in Utah in 1916 or 1917 and was declared dead some years later. Effing has M.S. write down a lurid and eventful tale about train-robbers and a hidden cave stocked with tinned food. There are some indications that Effing’s account is not completely accurate; for example, late in the novel he reminds M.S. that, 53 years earlier, he had found “a bag of money” (p. 203), money he’d used to give his new identity a start in life. However, when first telling the story, he had said he’d found the money (about $20,000), in the saddle bags (plural) of the three Gresham brothers, the outlaws whom he’d shot dead in a bout of preemptive self-defence.

The story must be substantially true, though. Other characters remember that the Gresham brothers had existed, and had suddenly disappeared about 50 years earlier. Afraid of being recognized as the missing Julian Barber, Effing goes to Europe on a forged passport and spends the next 20 years, up to the German occupation, in France. He tells M.S. that the 30 years since his return to the US can be summed up in a sentence or two. The memoir that M.S. has been writing is intended primarily to inform Solomon Barber, a history professor whose career is in the doldrums, of the reason why he has inherited about half of Thomas Effing’s estate. (The memoir is to be given to him only after Effing’s death, of course.)

Effing had come across the name “Solomon Barber” many years previously and soon realized that he must have conceived a son immediately before he left for Utah in 1916. He read the son’s publications and followed his obscure career but didn’t make himself known to him. Sol Barber never met his father and had no reason to suspect that the man was still alive until he was informed of his death. It appears that Effing was at once exasperated by his son’s failure to get on in the world and keen to give him what help he could — but only after he himself was no longer around.

M.S. meets Sol and the two get on very well. They’re alike in some ways, though the resemblance is concealed by Sol’s extreme obesity. Sol recognizes immediately that M.S. is his son — whose existence he didn’t suspect till then — but he doesn’t say anything about this until he is on his deathbed, a circumstance that arrives much quicker than he could have expected.

So, when M.S. took his job with Thomas Effing — a poorly paid demanding position that attracted no other applicants — he was going to work for his grandfather, though neither man was aware of the relationship. He would become instrumental in the old man’s making posthuymous contact with the son whose existence he didn’t know about until the son was well into adulthood — until, indeed, (approximately) the moment when M.S. himself was being conceived. That’s quite a series of coincidences.

Effing insists that there’s no such thing as coincidence:

“There are no coincidences. That word is used only by ignorant people. Everything in the world is made up of electricity, animate and inanimate things alike. Even thoughts give off an electrical charge. If they’re strong enough, a man’s thoughts can change the world around him. Don’t forget that, boy.” (pp. 104–5)

It’s not clear whether Effing means this literally or intends that it should be undestood by analogy. (Or it could just be a test of M.S.’s credulity.) In any case, it’s clear that the main theme of the novel (as of its successor) is an examination of the working of chance, happenstance, random occurrences.

After his mother is killed by a bus when he’s eleven, M.S. lives with her brother, his Uncle Victor. The compensation he receives for her death is expected to see him through college but some bad luck means that he needs to sell Uncle Victor’s collection of 1,492 books, which he has inherited, to hold on till after graduation. For a while, he’s subsisting on two boiled eggs a day. When he’s finally evicted, he has no plans for long-term survival:

If I had any thought at all it was to let chance determine what happened, to follow the path of impulse and arbitrary events. (pp. 50–1)

The results of this approach are, in the short term, mixed. M.S. spends several weeks sleeping rough in Central Park, gets caught in a torrential rainstorm, develops a fever, becomes delirious and nearly dies but is rescued by his old friend Zimmer who has been helping Kitty Wu to look for him. She is an extremely beautiful young woman whom he met (by chance, of course) while looking for Zimmer who had moved apartments. Kitty is the daughter of a senior Kuomintang officer by his second concubine. She was born in Taiwan, lived for a while in Tokyo and at the time when she meets M.S. is studying dance at Juilliard.

Still recovering from the fever, M.S. is (by chance) reminded just the day before his appointment, that he has to report for the draft. Severely underweight and evidently in bad shape, he fails the medical. He tells the doctor who examines him:

“Our lives are determined by manifold contingencies … Two years ago, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I decided to give up the struggle … I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form or pattern that would help me to penetrate myself …” (p. 80)

I guess it depends what he means by “determined”. I’m tempted to argue that for some sense(s) of the word the statement in first sentence is true, and for others definitely not, but that might take us quite far from a discussion of the novel. Instead, I’d like to take a brief look at something the novelist and critic Kevin Power wrote shortly after Auster’s death:

Contingency, as an aesthetic given, tends to undermine meaning from the ground up. Where meaning is absent, dead language creeps in.

That’s from The Irish Times on 1 May last. I’m not convinced that fiction has a responsibility to extract “meaning” from “the essentially dialectical nature of literature’s relationship with the real” or to “see the world anew”.

But it’s true that one often finds stock phrases in Auster’s writing. There were some instances in Moon Palace where I turned a page, confident that I knew what the next few words would be, and I was right. However, the example that particularly stuck with me doesn’t come at the top of a new page.

I shut myself up in a stubborn irrationality, more and more shocked by my own vehemence, but powerless to do anything about it. (p. 279; emphasis added)

This is in the context of M.S.’s attempt to dissuade Kitty from having an abortion. Having lived all his life without a father, and from the age of 11 without a mother, he doesn’t want to miss out on having a son or daughter. In fairness to M.S., he doesn’t expect Kitty to carry the child to term and he does pay for the termination. He remains a sympathetic character in spite of his “stubborn irrationality” and “vehemence”. But his attitude ends their relationship, to the distress of both of them (and of Sol, who doesn’t know what has happened between them, and who still hasn’t told M.S. about the biological relationship between them).

What I like about this novel has much more to do with its treatment of absent or missing fathers, fathers who withhold their presence (Effing) or conceal it (Sol), than with the broader theme of chance, contingency and unpredictability, which it shares with The Music of Chance. Of course, it’s not only fathers who are absent. M.S. was very young when he lost his mother. As a boy, Sol saw very little of his mother, who suffered from mental health problems after the disappearance of her husband. And Kitty, whatever may have happened to her afterwards, did not become a mother within the timeframe of the story.

The next post is due on 28 December. It will probably be about Tana French’s standalone novel, her first after the 6 books in the Dublin Murder Squad series, The Wych Elm (2018).

Edition: Faber paperback, 1990; emphasis and ellipses added.