After reading a few books that were far too close in tone to the project I’m working on, thankfully I stumbled into one that is unlike any I’ve read in a long time.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” or “High Fidelity,” they just muddled my thoughts a bit and complicated what I was doing.  Enter “Leviathan,” the third book I’ve read by the underrated Paul Auster.

It follows the usually enjoyable setup of “I’m telling you something about the end of this saga, but in order to understand the situation fully, let me now start at the beginning.”  The narrator learns that a man has blown himself up in northern Wisconsin, and after reading about it in the newspaper and getting a call from the FBI, he figures it is his friend.  He then tells the story of how they each made it to that point, a story of interwoven decisions and fates that build on one another until the final outcome is like two locomotives speeding toward one another.

Auster’s style, unlike that of say, Nick Hornby, relies much less on long stretches of quoted interactions.  If you’re not looking for it, it’s easy to miss, but I found myself at various times looking back and finding stretches of pages without a single piece of dialogue.  Just shows there are lots of ways to tell a story.

The man who blows himself up is a writer named Sachs, whose brain is always running with whatever he is working on consuming his thoughts.  The narrator describes him by saying, “The wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there.  This helped him as a writer, I think, since his best ideas seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk.”

I can’t even remotely tell you how many blog posts can be directly attributed to that notion.  I never sit down and say, “OK, let’s post something.”  Often what happens is I’ll wake up at some ridiculous hour thinking about something random, and know that I’ll continue thinking about it until I just bite the bullet and get up to write it all down.  Of course, then getting back to sleep afterward is a different challenge.

Sachs also deals with struggles that a lot of creative people go through with uncertainty about accurately evaluating their own work.  Author Bill Carter talked about this “imposter syndrome” in his book “The War for Latenight” – the feeling that no matter how good you are, someone’s going to eventually expose that you’re not.  In Sachs’ case, he asks the narrator to read the first third of a novel he is working on:

“I’ve reached a stage where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said.  “I can’t tell if it’s good or bad.  I can’t tell if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or a pile of garbage.”

Part of my lack of posts lately has been due to hitting this point with my own work.  I know I’ve said about 37 times that I’m going to do a proper update on what’s been going on, but I really do intend (possibly in the next week or so) to follow through on that.  Thankfully I feel like I’m through a really rough patch, thanks to consultant/editor/consigliere AV’s push, echoed by the narrator in this story, to “just keep writing.”

For anyone who insists that growing a beard is a good idea, I’m going to use Sachs’ wisdom as my excuse for not letting it grow.  After spending some time in the hospital, he rocks a beard for a while before snapping out of that phase for the sake of the country:

“He wanted to do his bit for capitalism.  By shaving three or four times a week, he would be helping keep the razorblade companies in business, which meant that he would be contributing to the good of the American economy, to the health and prosperity of all.”

So remember that next time you suggest I let the beard grow.  As much as I enjoy ditching the beard, I get even greater satisfaction out of seeing random references I understand from having read other books.  In this case my knowledge was thanks to Ralph Keyes and his book “I Love it When You Talk Retro.”  It’s only because of him that this made any sense:

“You always dressed me up when we went out, and I hated it.  I felt like a sissy in those clothes, a Fauntleroy in full regalia.”

Fauntleroy, Keyes writes, is Little Lord Fauntleroy, who first appeared in literary works in 1886.  “As much as the text itself, detailed drawings of Little Lord Fauntleroy in a dark velvet suit with a scalloped white collar created an indelible image of this idealized child.  They inspired a type of formal (some would say prissy) boys’ wear.”

And I don’t have anything else to add to this, but I loved this quote too much not to share.  It’s from Sachs’ wife, Fanny:

“You don’t want to get stuck in the past.  Life is too interesting for that.