Fiction review: The Invisible

FICTION

In the long history of novels, love triangles have rarely ended well. The one that drives Paul Auster's fascinating new novel, "Invisible," certainly doesn't. But it began so casually that now, 40 years later, Auster's protagonist has trouble recalling the details of that first fateful meeting.

Adam Walker had been a Columbia University student and an aspiring poet when he met Rudolf Born, a French political scientist serving a one-year professorship at the university. They chatted about various hot-button issues -- the Vietnam War, the JFK assassination -- while Born's black-clad companion, Margot, stared "into space as if her central mission in life was to look bored."

Two days later, though, when Walker and Born happen to meet again, Walker has an impulse to avoid him, as if he knew "that allowing myself to get involved with him could possibly lead to trouble."

Instead, he sits down across from Born. And the trouble begins.

Born has inherited money, he says, and because Margot has insisted that he help the young poet, Born proposes to launch a literary magazine with Walker serving as its editor.

Born leaves the country to address "a crisis" before they can settle the details, though, and in his absence, Walker finds himself drawn into a five-day-long, passionate affair with Margot, whose culinary and sexual skills prove too appealing to turn down.

Unfortunately, Born, who may have shady ties to French spy groups, is not the sort you want to cross, as Walker learns when Born returns to New York. As they discuss the magazine proposal on a dark street, a young mugger pulls a gun on them, and Born stabs him with a switchblade. Then he threatens to kill Walker as well, if he talks to the police.

Walker is more complicated than Born thinks, though, and the two -- with Margo as an unwilling participant -- engage in a deliciously convoluted story of transgressions and revenge.

Auster, a master storyteller with a hatful of tricks, puts on such an impressive show here (including a nifty mix of narrators) that it threatens to obscure the quiet beauty of his understated, concise prose. Resist the urge to read "Invisible" at top speed. Auster's fiction is too good to rush, tangled love triangle or no.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.