Alan Rafferty
BRICK VS BRILL
Man in the Dark
By Paul Auster (Faber & Faber 160pp £14.99)

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In the early Nineties Paul Auster staged a literary kidnapping or - the phrase he prefers - a 'trans-fictional marriage'. He took a character from a novel by his wife, Siri Hustvedt, and wedded her to the protagonist of his then-inchoate book Leviathan. Much might be read into this about the relationship between the two writers. Although Hustvedt is well regarded, Auster is more highly acclaimed and sells more books; many readers of both assumed that Hustvedt had borrowed Auster's character - that her work was derivative of his. However, what might seem to be literary bullying was, in Hustvedt's view, anything but. She has explained that 'I always thought it was nice that she ended up in another book, actually doing quite well. I had that nice feeling that Paul had saved her.'

Hustvedt might also have pointed out that when Auster borrowed her creation he was indulging one of his chief literary habits - switching people in and out of different stories. In previous novels Auster has borrowed figures from Poe, Hawthorne and, most often, his own oeuvre. But what he enjoys most is moving characters between different levels of stories: having someone from a character's dream walk in the door or inserting real people, including himself, into his books.

Man in the Dark is narrated by August Brill, a retired literary critic of some distinction. Infirm and insomniac, he lies awake in the house he shares with his middle-aged daughter and 23-year-old granddaughter and tries to avoid thinking about how much he misses his wife, who has died recently, and about the murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend Titus, whom Brill had known since he was a child. To help with this, Brill begins to invent a story about a man called Owen Brick who wakes up one morning to find himself not at home but in another America - one riven by a civil war that has its origins in the disputed 2000 presidential election. New York and other states have broken away from the union and George W Bush has declared non-nuclear war upon them. Brick is immediately conscripted into the secessionist army and told that his mission is to end the war by assassinating its progenitor - not the aggressor Bush but the fantasist Brill, who is imagining the whole thing into reality from his bed (thereby plunging a world of people into turmoil) and whom Brick must kill.

Brill's imaginings are frequently interrupted. And so there are digressions on, amongst other things, Yasujiro Ozu's film Tokyo Story ('a work as subtle and moving as a Tolstoy novella') and American bellicosity ('America's at war, all right. We're just not fighting it here. Not yet anyway') and the disappointing nature of humanity ('the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations - they're an essential part of who we are').

What Brill and Auster are really interested in, however, is telling stories about people - about talented, heroic, beautiful people; and about the horrifying things that sometimes happen to them. It is through having stories told about them that Auster's characters come alive. The corollary to this is that his narrator, Brill, remains out of focus: we learn more about the fictitious Brick than the 'real' Brill. Auster suggests that you understand a person by telling stories about him. The absent characters - Titus and Brill's dead wife - are the more vivid ones here because their absence leaves the other characters free to fabulate about them, and they become the sum of the stories told about them.

Auster is often - rightly - characterised as a postmodern author, and the story-based approach to character development he employs here owes much to Jacques Lacan. Auster is also a witty writer, prepared to play with his literary heritage. Having Brill imagine his own would-be killer into existence is, of course, a droll reference to Roland Barthes's writings on the death of the author: a suicide in Brill's case. Auster's fiddling with characters and entangling of storylines is playful and entertaining, as well as ostentatiously clever.

That Paul Auster is again nimbly dropping his characters into and out of stories and deftly digressing on a wide range of topics shows that, in Man in the Dark, he has regained his poise. The book is in part a response to the Iraq war, and Auster deals with current affairs better here than he did in The Brooklyn Follies (set on the eve of 9/11), although his politics remain uncomplicatedly monochrome. What's more, in the war he has found something important to say about the bad things that happen to us in life, and why we should keep going anyway.

Alan Rafferty is an ice-cold reviewer and a very lovely person.