Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (ISBN 0312422326)

Amazon.com Review:
It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time.

Not All Editions Include Game & Detective Novel Extras:
Hand to Mouth, by itself, is a somewhat raw but not at all insensitive memoir of life before publishing. I found it engrossing at times. Auster recounts his youthful rejection of middle class consumerism, his odd and fascinating encounters with all kinds of characters and life situations, his stay in Paris, his first marriage, his ...well... failures to make it big as a writer. His admirable sense of integrity (no jobs except ones literary) unfortunately kept the author wallowing in translation work to put food on the table, and the sense of pain, desperation and even a sort of starvation are palpable. Agonizingly, but rather fittingly, he tells only of his years BEFORE success. This is no rags to fame & riches story. Hand to Mouth is basically a reality check. Of some value to anyone who wants to get published, but the only thing that keeps this from being totally depressing is our knowledge of Auster's eventual literary success. Lovely sections about the wacky people he met on ships and on streets reveal inspiration for characters he brings alive in his humanistic fiction. If you do buy an edition (check out the number of pages before you order) which contains "Action Baseball" and "Squeeze Play", you are in for a treat. The former is a complete card game and the latter is a detective novel. Squeeze Play was written under a pseudonym and features a Jewish private eye with a law degree from Columbia who has a taste for fine wine and music. Mickey Spillane gets urban Semitic spit & polish in this totally enjoyable bonus read.

Auster Fans Only:
By and large, this book will be of interest to Auster fans only. The first section is a brief autobiography, which may be boiled down to this: "How I Tried to Avoid Having a Regular Job." It's all about the crazy schemes Auster had to make money while not working 9-5. The stories are good, though nothing amazing. As he chronicles his early life, he references his "Appendices" -- a couple of one-act plays, a card-based baseball game he'd invented, and his first novel. I'd say of the entire book, the novel may be the best part. It's strictly a by-the-numbers noir novel (the unwilling detective, the femme fatale, a larger-than-life victim), but it's executed very nicely. It's funny how Auster thinks nothing of his work -- according to the memoir, he churned this out in three months (June-August), which to me is pretty impressive, but I suppose Auster thinks it's just pulp... I don't think it is, though because he stays so within the confines of the genre, it almost comes off as parody. Still, it's an enjoyable read. 3 stars

When Am I Gonna Make A Living?:
Paul Auster's autobiographical account spanning about 12 years or so after he finished college, is an excellent exposition of a young writer's search for meaning, and then the translation of that meaning into money, to provide for further existence, to allow the writer to keep producing work, representative of his desires, but also able to be sold for money to continue the quest. The appeal to almost all people is hidden in the fact, that at anytime, any person, can be living a "hand to mouth" existence. This feeling of abject poverty and financial ruin is not uncommon today, in an economy that has lost over 2 million jobs, and forced hundreds of thousands to start their own businesses because work was not available. Those in America who have had to do this, can relate directly to Auster's feelings, especially the salient concept of when will I ever get to the point when I am making a living again, even a somewhat less luxurious one than before, just any living. As usual, Auster uses his incredible incisiveness and truly exceptional clarity in his construction of this book. It is of special interest to Auster readers, as it gives the reader some very interesting information about the author's early days when he was still struggling to become known. But Auster's story is one that every actor, every writer, every lawyer, every doctor, or most of them anyway, have to go through at the beginning, including every new entrepreneur. Becoming established is very hard work. And more people fail, than succeed. This high failure rate is generated by the need to be able to sustain high levels of suffering in bad times, to get to the good times. Most of us are just not up to the task.

or 'How To Clean Out Your Desk and Make Money':
My eye was caught by the pretty photo of the author on the cover. Now that I've read this stinker, I bet he lovingly searched for the best(old) photo of himself. I've never heard of him before but he joins the ranks of those who work hardest trying to avoid work. He's the Maynard G. Krebs (Work!) of Columbia, Class of 69'. Couldn't Paul Auster have had some nobility about taking good care of his wife and son? Oh, yeah, that would mean someone else coming first in his life. After I closed the cover I wondered what messed up this guy to never attach to anything. I looked him up on the internet and it's the old story-getting old, settling down, and finally growing up. And cleaning out his desk and diary and making a buck off it.

A Disappointment:
I love Auster and when I first started reading this memoir about his early days of struggle as a writer, I was throughly engrossed. There was something open and honest about his early years, and although it runs parallel to many of the struggles writers go through, his was particularly interesting because of the wonderful people he meets along the way and the interesting situations and work environments he finds himself. But something happens halfway in and the work just comes to a halt. It loses its momentum and becomes trite and even boring. Auster fans will enjoy the early play and detective novel included, but even those seem thrown in, as if Auster knew that what he was publishing was not worth the money.