The red notebook : and other writings

The arresting stories in this slim collection by Auster (The New York Trilogy, etc.) go a long way toward answering the perennial question "Why write?" The book contains four short narratives: "The Red Notebook," "It Don't Mean a Thing," "Accident Report" and "Why Write?" All the tales and vignettes, hovering somewhere between fact and fiction, feature amazing little coincidences or linkages. In one brief chapter, Auster (as protagonist) loses a dime in a gutter in Brooklyn only to look down and find a dime later the same day. In another, he checks into a hotel room in an obscure hotel in Paris and finds a crumpled message from the desk to a close friend-the previous occupant of the room. The most affecting stories, however, recount a more ineffable sense of connection: Auster makes it to the foot of a staircase to catch his little daughter just in time to keep her from sailing through a window; as a boy at summer camp, he is on a group hike when the boy next to him is struck by lightning and killed. What all the stories have in common is not a fixed outcome or meaning but a sense of the patterned meaningfulness of life. Readers will glimpse here how the act of witnessing itself provides the punch line.