The Music of Chance
Page 1
Praise for The Music of Chance
“The Music of Chance is witty, even jaunty—you won’t read much better writing anywhere about the lure of the open road—and it catches the reader in a surprisingly strong spell. It’s still further evidence that Auster is one of the few contemporary American novelists whose work is both original and interesting.”
—The Washington Post
“A tour de force about freedom and imprisonment, motion and stasis, order and randomness … its story beautifully paced and shaped, its tone powerfully ominous, its prose unfailingly limpid, supple, and energetic.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Paul Auster’s fiction combines an exceptionally smooth and poised style with an old-fashioned commitment to intricate plotting…. The prose gives his novels an irresistible charm, the plot sweeps the reader into unexpected and dizzying byways of the mind. The experience is a bit like swimming in beautiful and exotic waters.”
—New York Newsday
“The Music of Chance tackles all those serious themes that American novelists aren’t supposed to be good at anymore: fate, loyalty, responsibility, the nature of evil, and the real meaning of freedom. A thriller with conscience, The Music of Chance is one of the best American novels of the year.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“With The Music of Chance, Auster continues to explore and elaborate upon his particular brand of fictional obsessions, even as he widens the range and flexibility of his subject matter and narrative voice.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Offbeat and strangely compelling … In this lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questions of servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom, and the inexplicable urge to kill.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Auster works over the language of the novel with the eyes of a poet and hands of a storyteller…. The Music of Chance sustains the brilliance of his previous writing, providing another rare experience of contemporary fiction at its most thrilling.”
—New Statesman & Society (London)
“A carefully plotted work, elegantly sparse in its narration as it narrows to a concentrated conclusion of great intensity. There is pleasure to be had not only from Auster’s prose but also from the odd mixture of detachment and suspense that the novel induces.”
—The New York Review of Books
“This story is a maze of literary mind games—metaphors and references that ricochet playfully from page to page. It is an exceptional novel about the interplay of freedom and chance which takes you on an engrossing tour of a man’s inner life.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Auster’s sleight of hand imbues his work with a haunting sense of the uncanny…. An intriguing story about one man’s escape from freedom.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“He can write with the speed and skill of a self-assured pool player, sending one bizarre event ricocheting neatly and unexpectedly into the next … creating a narrative that continually manages to elude our expectations. A chilling little story that’s entertaining, provocative, and resonant.”
—The New York Times
“Auster writes in a cooly sustained neo-noir voice tinged with existential mystery. The Music of Chance is never less than fascinating, Auster’s prose is simple and driven…. He is a writer unafraid of intensity, eager to enlarge his clever novels with universal questions.”
—The Boston Globe
“Paul Auster is one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers. His narratives slide easily from the ordinary to the just-plausible to the impossibly outlandish…. His prose remains unflappable, meticulously recording the details of even the most extreme situations with elegance and precision. Auster is an experimental writer who is also compulsively readable…. His novels are impossible to put down.”
—The Times Literary Supplement (London)
“The Music of Chance is a rare achievement: a novel of formal sophistication which is not consciously exquisite or ostentatiously ground-breaking; a novel whose philosophical concerns convincingly arise out of its action and the fates of its characters, without airily rising above them or schematically giving rise to them; a novel in which the consciousness of an all-unsettling uncertainty does not abolish moral urgency about the seriousness of human bonds. Its dramatic meditation on the moments when things are ‘in harmony’ and the other moments when they go ‘out of whack’ gives, rightly, no answers—but it gives clear form to the chaos we sense ourselves verging on when coincidence suddenly shifts our inner bearings.”
—London Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL AUSTER is the author of the novels The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan (awarded the 1993 Prix Medicis Étranger), The Music of Chance (nominated for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award), Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things, and the three novels known as “The New York Trilogy”: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. He has also written two memoirs (The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth), a collection of essays, and a volume of poems, and edited the book I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project. Auster was the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. He has won literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose, and in 1990 received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
THE MUSIC
OF CHANCE
Paul Auster
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in the United States of America by
Viking Penguin, a division of
Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990
Published in Penguin Books 1991
Copyright © Paul Auster, 1990
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGUED THE HARDCOVER AS FOLLOWS:
Auster, Paul, 1947–
The music of chance / Paul Auster.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-670-83535-8 (hc.)
ISBN 978-01-40-15407-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-101-56260-4 (epub)
&nbs
p; I. Title.
PS3551.U77M87 1990
813’.54—dc20 90–50005
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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Table of Contents
Praise for The Music of Chance
About the Author
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1
For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forth across America as he waited for the money to run out. He hadn’t expected it to go on that long, but one thing kept leading to another, and by the time Nashe understood what was happening to him, he was past the point of wanting it to end. Three days into the thirteenth month, he met up with the kid who called himself Jackpot. It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air—a twig that breaks off in the wind and suddenly lands at your feet. Had it occurred at any other moment, it is doubtful that Nashe would have opened his mouth. But because he had already given up, because he figured there was nothing to lose anymore, he saw the stranger as a reprieve, as a last chance to do something for himself before it was too late. And just like that, he went ahead and did it. Without the slightest tremor of fear, Nashe closed his eyes and jumped.
It all came down to a question of sequence, the order of events. If it had not taken the lawyer six months to find him, he never would have been on the road the day he met Jack Pozzi, and therefore none of the things that followed from that meeting ever would have happened. Nashe found it unsettling to think of his life in those terms, but the fact was that his father had died a full month before Thérèse walked out on him, and if he had had some inkling of the money he was about to inherit, he probably could have talked her into staying. Even if she hadn’t stayed, there would have been no need to take Juliette out to Minnesota to live with his sister, and that alone would have kept him from doing what he did. But he still had his job with the fire department back then, and how was he supposed to take care of a two-year-old child when his work kept him out of the house at all hours of the day and night? If there had been some money, he would have hired a woman to live with them and look after Juliette, but if there had been any money, they wouldn’t have been renting the bottom half of a dismal two-family house in Somerville, and Thérèse might never have run off in the first place. It wasn’t that his salary was so bad, but his mother’s stroke four years ago had emptied him out, and he was still sending monthly payments down to the rest home in Florida where she had died. Given all that, his sister’s place had seemed like the only solution. At least Juliette would have a chance to live with a real family, to be surrounded by other kids and to breathe some fresh air, and that was a lot better than anything he could offer her himself. Then, out of the blue, the lawyer found him and the money fell into his lap. It was a colossal sum—close to two hundred thousand dollars, an almost unimaginable sum to Nashe—but by then it was already too late. Too many things had been set in motion during the past five months, and not even the money could stop them anymore.
He had not seen his father in over thirty years. The last time had been when he was two, and since then there had been no contact between them—not one letter, not one phone call, nothing. According to the lawyer who handled the estate, Nashe’s father had spent the last twenty-six years of his life in a small California desert town not far from Palm Springs. He had owned a hardware store, had played the stock market in his spare time, and had never remarried. He had kept his past to himself, the lawyer said, and it was only when Nashe Senior walked into his office one day to make out a will that he ever mentioned having any children. “He was dying of cancer,” the voice on the telephone continued, “and he didn’t know who else to leave his money to. He figured he might as well split it between his two kids—half for you and half for Donna.”
“A peculiar way to make amends,” Nashe said.
“Well, he was a peculiar one, your old man, no question about it. I’ll never forget what he said when I asked him about you and your sister. ‘They probably hate my guts,’ he said, ‘but it’s too late to cry about that now. I only wish I could be around after I croak—just to see the look on their faces when they get the money.’”
“I’m surprised he knew where to find us.”
“He didn’t,” the lawyer said. “And believe me, I’ve had one hell of a time tracking you down. It’s taken me six months.”
“It would have been a lot better for me if you’d made this call on the day of the funeral.”
“Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don’t. Six months ago, I still didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”
It wasn’t possible to feel grief, but Nashe assumed that he would be touched in some other way—by something akin to sadness, perhaps, by a surge of last-minute angers and regrets. The man had been his father, after all, and that alone should have counted for a few somber thoughts about the mysteries of life. But it turned out that Nashe felt little else but joy. The money was so extraordinary to him, so monumental in its consequences, that it overwhelmed all the rest. Without pausing to consider the matter very carefully, he paid off his thirty-two-thousand-dollar debt to the Pleasant Acres Nursing Home, went out and bought himself a new car (a red two-door Saab 900—the first unused car he had ever owned), and cashed in on the vacation time that he had accumulated over the past four years. The night before he left Boston, he threw a lavish party in his own honor, carried on with his friends until three o’clock in the morning, and then, without bothering to go to bed, climbed into the new car and drove to Minnesota.
That was where the roof started to cave in on him. In spite of all the celebrating and reminiscing that went on during those days, Nashe gradually understood that the situation was beyond repair. He had been away from Juliette for too long, and now that he had come back for her, it was as if she had forgotten who he was. He had thought the telephone calls would be enough, that talking to her twice a week would somehow keep him alive for her. But what do two-year-olds know about long-distance conversations? For six months, he had been nothing but a voice to her, a vaporous collection of sounds, and little by little he had turned himself into a ghost. Even after he had been in the house for two or three days, Juliette remained shy and tentative with him, shrinking back from his attempts to hold her as though she no longer fully believed in his existence. She had become a part of her new family, and he was little more than an intruder, an alien being who had dropped down from another planet. He cursed himself for having left her there, for having arranged things so well. Juliette was now the adored little princess of the household. There were three older cousins for her to play with, there was the Labrador retriever, there was the cat, there was the swing in the backyard, there was everything she could possibly want. It galled him to think that he had been usurped by his brother-in-law, and as the days wore on he had to struggle not to show his resentment. An ex–football player turned high school coach and math teacher, Ray Schweikert had always struck Nashe as something of a knucklehead, but there was no question that the guy had a way with kids. He was Mr. Good, the big-hearted American dad, and with Donna there to hold things together, the family was as solid as a rock. Nashe had some money now, but how had anything really changed? He tried to imagine how Juliette
’s life could be improved by going back to Boston with him, but he could not muster a single argument in his own defense. He wanted to be selfish, to stand on his rights, but his nerve kept failing him, and at last he gave in to the obvious truth. To wrench Juliette away from all this would do her more harm than good.
When he told Donna what he was thinking, she tried to talk him out of it, using many of the same arguments she had thrown at him twelve years before when he told her he was planning to quit college: Don’t be rash, give it a little more time, don’t burn your bridges behind you. She was wearing that worried big-sister look he had seen on her all through his childhood, and even now, three or four lifetimes later, he knew that she was the one person in the world he could trust. They wound up talking late into the night, sitting in the kitchen long after Ray and the kids had gone to bed, but for all of Donna’s passion and good sense, it turned out just as it had twelve years before: Nashe wore her down until she started to cry, and then he got his way.
His one concession to her was that he would set up a trust fund for Juliette. Donna sensed that he was about to do something crazy (she told him as much that night), and before he ran through the entire inheritance, she wanted him to set aside a part of it, to put it in a place where it couldn’t be touched. The following morning, Nashe spent two hours with the manager of the Northfield Bank and made the necessary arrangements. He hung around for the rest of that day and part of the next, and then he packed his bags and loaded up the trunk of his car. It was a hot afternoon in late July, and the whole family came out onto the front lawn to see him off. One after the other, he hugged and kissed the children, and when Juliette’s turn came at the end, he hid his eyes from her by picking her up and crushing his face into her neck. Be a good girl, he said. Don’t forget that Daddy loves you.
He had told them he was planning to go back to Massachusetts, but as it happened, he soon found himself traveling in the opposite direction. That was because he missed the ramp to the freeway—a common enough mistake—but instead of driving the extra twenty miles that would have put him back on course, he impulsively went up the next ramp, knowing full well that he had just committed himself to the wrong road. It was a sudden, unpremeditated decision, but in the brief time that elapsed between the two ramps, Nashe understood that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same. He had said Boston, but that was only because he had to tell them something, and Boston was the first word that entered his head. For the fact was that no one was expecting to see him there for another two weeks, and with so much time at his disposal, why bother to go back? It was a dizzying prospect—to imagine all that freedom, to understand how little it mattered what choice he made. He could go anywhere he wanted, he could do anything he felt like doing, and not a single person in the world would care. As long as he did not turn back, he could just as well have been invisible.