The Invention of Solitude

Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is a memoir divided into two parts. The first, "Portrait of an Invisible Man," is a direct, first-person account of Auster's attempt to reckon with his father's life and death. The second, "The Book of Memory," shifts to a fragmented, third-person meditation on solitude, fatherhood, and memory, with the author referring to himself as "A." Together, the two halves investigate the father-son bond and the act of writing as a form of remembrance.

"Portrait of an Invisible Man" opens with the sudden death of Auster's father, Sam Auster. While preparing breakfast for his young son, Daniel, one Sunday morning, Auster received the phone call. Even before packing for the drive to New Jersey, he felt compelled to write about his father, fearing that without quick action, Sam's entire life would vanish. What disturbed him was not grief but the realization that Sam left almost no traces. Auster describes his father as an "invisible man," someone devoid of passion who avoided connection with others.

After the parents' divorce, Sam had remained alone for fifteen years in the large Tudor-style family house in New Jersey, which fell into quiet disrepair while he maintained a surface tidiness, never changing or discarding anything. Auster spends ten days clearing out the house, finding objects that feel intrusive: stray condoms, hidden tubes of hair coloring. The worst moment came when he dumped more than a hundred of his father's ties into a charity truck in the rain, an act that, more than watching the coffin lowered into the ground, made the death real to him. In a bedroom closet, he discovers hundreds of photographs. A trick photograph from an Atlantic City studio shows five images of Sam sitting around a table, a "seance" in which he seems to invoke himself, yet none of the selves can make eye contact with the others.

Auster reconstructs his parents' unhappy marriage. Sam married at thirty-four; Auster's mother was twenty-one. By the honeymoon in Niagara Falls, the mother already knew the marriage would not work. When she went into labor on her twenty-second birthday, Sam insisted the baby was not due and left for work, not arriving at the hospital until the next morning. Auster recalls his childhood as defined by his father's absence, with rare moments of connection standing out against pervasive distance. His sister, born when Auster was three and a half, was fragile and insecure. When the mother sought psychiatric help for the girl, Sam refused in a rage, insisting throughout the sister's subsequent mental health crises that she merely needed a job.

The memoir's central revelation is a family secret. Sam had told three contradictory stories about his own father's death, and no one in the family discussed the grandfather. In 1970, a cousin met an old man from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who recognized the Auster name and later sent newspaper articles revealing that on January 23, 1919, Auster's grandmother, Anna Auster, shot and killed her husband Harry in their kitchen. Harry was thirty-six. She initially claimed suicide but later confessed, saying he had abused her. The defense argued emotional insanity, and the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in less than two hours. Anna declared, "I am happier now than I have been for seventeen years" (46). The family left Kenosha and moved east.

Auster traces how this trauma shaped his father. Anna's four sons, including Sam, remained fiercely loyal throughout their lives and became business partners. Anna was a tyrant who demanded absolute allegiance. Sam built a real estate business in northern New Jersey, managing nearly a hundred buildings and earning the nickname "Mr. Sam." His relationship to money was shaped by childhood deprivation: He spent as little as possible, seeing wealth as protection rather than pleasure. The first part closes with Auster's reflections on the funeral, his regret at never seeing his father's body, and an image of Daniel asleep in his crib.

"The Book of Memory" opens on Christmas Eve, 1979. A. is alone in a room on Varick Street in lower Manhattan, a former industrial space with a mattress on the floor and a corroded sink. He writes the words "It was. It will never be again" on a blank page, a refrain that recurs throughout. The shift to the third person is a deliberate strategy of self-erasure through which the narrator seeks to find himself in the act of disappearing. The thirteen numbered sections that follow are presented as the document A. is composing in his room, collapsing the act of writing and the text being read into a single object.

A. frames his project through stories of fathers and sons, solitude, and coincidence. He recounts how a friend's father hid from the Nazis in a Paris chambre de bonne (a small servant's room) during World War II, and the friend later rented the same room by chance. A. himself once lived in such a room, where his own father visited him. He describes visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and suddenly beginning to cry, an involuntary response he identifies as the moment The Book of Memory began. He recalls S., an eccentric Russian composer he befriended in Paris at eighteen who became a surrogate father: Born the same year as A.'s father, S. lived in a tiny room working on a vast composition he knew he would never finish.

Two months after his father's death, A.'s marriage collapsed, and he moved into the Varick Street room. Shortly afterward, six-year-old Etan Patz disappeared from the same neighborhood. Photographs of the missing boy, headlined "LOST CHILD," appeared everywhere, and because the boy's face resembled his own son's, A. experienced the posters as a mirror of his private loss.

A.'s maternal grandfather was hospitalized, and A. took responsibility for his care. During a weekend visit, A.'s son developed pneumonia with asthmatic complications and had to be rushed to the hospital. This near-death became a pivotal moment: A. grasped the full scope of his fatherhood, realizing the boy's life meant more to him than his own. He translated fragments that the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote at the bedside of Mallarmé's dying eight-year-old son Anatole in 1879, finding in the work a way to relive his own panic. Near the end of the grandfather's life, the old man told A. that remembering was giving him pleasure, as if memory itself could hold off death.

Throughout the second half, A. meditates on rooms as spaces of solitude and creativity, invoking the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who spent thirty-six years in a tower room after a mental breakdown, and Vermeer's paintings of women alone in light-filled interiors. He reads Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio to his son and argues that the image of Pinocchio swimming through the sea with Gepetto on his back, the son saving the father, is the story's essential meaning. He connects this to the ancient Roman hero Aeneas bearing his father Anchises from Troy, and to his own rescue of his father through writing. He reflects on The Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade saves her life by telling stories, arguing that a voice speaking of life and death has the power to give life.

In the final sections, A. records a litany of childhood memories and reflects on his young son's capacity for recall. He describes dreaming for the first time that he was dying: Nurses shaved his head and ordered him into a coffin, but he escaped, instructed his ex-wife to finish The Book of Memory and give it to Daniel, and returned to embrace his childhood friends in farewell. A. lays out a fresh sheet of paper and writes the last words: "It was. It will never be again. Remember."