Paul Auster- Hand To Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Hand to Mouth- A Chronicle of Early Failure

Picador Press

Paul Auster

1997

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - In The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - Auggie Wren's Christmas Story - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Travels in the Scriptorium - Man in the Dark - Invisible

“But money, of course, is never just money. It's always something else, and it's always something more, and it always has the last word.”

One of the more obscure entries in Paul Auster's bibliography (which after ten years I'm finally getting near to finishing), Hand to Mouth is a prequel to his name-making 1982 debut The Invention of Solitude- the collection of introspective personal memoirs surrounding the death of his father. Again taken with the need to chronicle his own life, this short tome covers the period of Auster's experiences from his latter university days up until his first serious attempts at novel writing, and so mostly consists of self-admittedly overzealous failed writer angst, mixed-up with his memories of some very odd people whom influenced him on the way. It's also a very brief read, as Auster purposefully condenses experiences and descriptions of others that others may have dwelled upon into barely 160-pages.

Auster is super cool.

This brevity is the key to Hand to Mouth's final status as an amusing, but unfortunately irrelevant read- even to someone as fascinated by Auster's long-form prose fiction as I. The appeal of the book was obvious; the chance to perhaps further understand the creative process of a literary hero, but such opportunities seemed few and far between. Though Auster describes the extent of his earlier self's desperation, the introspective self-analysis contains more than a hint of embarrassment at the naivety of youth, and lacks enough detail to suggest important life-points. I get the feeling that Auster wanted to recapture the autobiographical spirit of his predecessors (such as Jack London with John Barleycorn), but was probably too much of a normal person to stand out.

As a result, his exploits meander from slightly interesting, such as his travels to France and Ireland, to generic normality, to absurdity- the latter referring to the time he spent serious time and effort trying to create and have published his own baseball-inspired card game. Auster's baseball fascination nearly always results in easily the worse segments from his fiction, and does so again in this autobiography, where it just seems so stupid and pointless it actually seemed to bring him down in my estimation.

As an Auster devotee (as, I imagine, 95% of the people who read this book will be), I found it amusing and mostly likable enough, but disappointing with that. There are certain aspects which relate to the motivations of characters in his book (particularly the sublime Moon Palace), probably more than I noticed, but not enough for it to seem revelatory. If any non-Auster fans come across Hand to Mouth, I'm sure they'd probably appreciate it as a decent, well-constructed light read also, though little more than that. In essence it's a curio, a self-obsessed long essay that Auster likely never intended to make waves but which he probably felt he needed to write.