“What law says you can’t love a maniac?”

I’m becoming convinced that’s the quote that may one day appear on my wedding announcement, just below an artsy black-and-white photo of my fiancee and I staring longingly at each other over a Taco Bell dinner.  I’ll let you decide if the maniac is me or her.

Actually, it’s a line from Paul Auster’s novel “Invisible,” the latest in a string of his books that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.  One of the things I like so much about his writing is that his stories are so distinct from one another — there’s no “thing” he does that makes his books seem like interchangeable stories.

In “Invisible,” one of the defining style characteristics is a complete lack of quotation marks.  It’s amazing, as if he decided to write the whole thing and go back to put in the quote marks later, but never did.  It takes a few pages to get used to, but then becomes completely transparent.  I’d be interested to know why he made that choice.  Auster also nails a dual-narrator, changing tenses thing that is way harder to pull off than he makes it seem.

Part of the story takes place at Columbia University where the main character, Adam, is a student who aspires to be a writer.  At one point he’s discussing his potential with an older guy he met at a party and mentions that he writes for the school newspaper.

“Do you get paid for your articles?”
“Of course not, it’s a college paper.”

This exchange actually made me laugh.  When I wrote for the newspaper at my undergrad school, we also didn’t get paid.  It was an issue I explored in the documentary I made about the paper during my senior year, and the editors I spoke to then were very split on the issue.  Some thought paying writers would lead to more interested writers and better content.  Others argued that aspiring journalists should, you know, want to actually try writing for a newspaper.

Another section that has little bearing on the plot, but made me think of my college days happens later after Adam has a frightening night with the man.  He recounts the two of them walking in the city, being approached by a mugger with a gun, and then watching as the man stabs the kid.  He’s reading the paper in the student center when he finds out the kid’s body was found in a nearby park with many more stab wounds than seemed necessary.

“I chanced upon the article while drinking a cup of coffee in the Lions Den, the snack bar on the ground floor of the undergraduate student center…”

As important as this stabbing tale is to the book, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the awesomeness of the snack bar’s name.  Where I went to school, the similar-sounding establishment was called the Encore Cafe.  After a renovation, it’s now known as Benny’s Bistro. 

I would have been much more enthusiastic about going to a Lions Den.