I have always been a little bit obsessed with final books. Maybe that's an unfair articulation of it. I grew up with the (false) notion that Kafka's "The Trial" was a final novel, because it was left unfinished, and the shadow of that experience led from one book to another in this context (his final novel was 'The Castle,' also unfinished if my memory serves...). My friends and I who discussed literature (a small, but intimate circle) would trade experiences, and discuss works in this vein. Oh, you liked that book? Have you read Pulp by Bukowski? Or Vonnegut's Timequake? If you're into Salinger, you have to check out the double-header Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. Isn't Finnegans Wake a final novel? Should we include artists who did not necessarily produce a great body of work, like Harper Lee? Or those whose 'last' works did not necessarily correspond to the end of their life, like Rimbaud?
If one searches for 'final novels,' the list expands at a seismic rate. Daniel Deronda, Dorian Gray, Wuthering Heights, 1984, and The Brothers K. rank among the most sanctified books with this distinction. There is Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and Island by Aldous Huxley. It is not sufficient to celebrate a work as an artist's 'swan song,' but there is the expectation that an author's final work have some insightful and retrospective relationship to an entire oeuvre. It is in this context, with this interest, that I picked up Paul Auster's Baumgartner, a plaintive meditation on death, chance, and legacy which offers an opportunity to reflect on the undeniable significance of the author as one of the foremost voices in American letters, in its entire short history.
Auster's protagonist is the seventy-one year old Seymour Baumgartner, from whom the novel takes its name. Baumgartner is an aging professor of phenomenology, still mired in grief after the death of his longtime wife and partner, Anna. This, like many other aspects of the novel, seems to function rhetorically, that is, as an assumption which is the kernel of an unspoken argument: grief is not like a water-spout which can be turned on and off, but a continual process of negotiating and re-negotiating the very essential terms of philosophy, how to live best and what to do with the time we're given. Our introduction to this character, our hero, is anything but staid and dignified. In a state of half-distraction, after realizing he has left the burner on, he reaches for a pot and scalds his hand. Very shortly afterward, after assessing his well-being and facing a series of interruptions and mental digressions (no doubt, illustrating the obscenely educated quality of this character, but also his aging nature, and, for lack of a better term, doofishness––I assert, these are quite chiseled and intentional factors, but more on that later), he falls down the stairs of his basement, trying to lead a young meter-reader to his electrical system. Most of the book is thereafter split between the business of memory/fantasy, especially as it pertains to Anna and her burgeoning courtship with Baumgartner, and the mundanities of an aging professor's day to day: new books and projects seen through to completion, and, at the novel's end, correspondence between our protagonist and a young scholar who wishes to study Anna's work, including the archive of unpublished and personal materials, which themselves corroborate the account given by her husband. Aside from excerpts of Anna's 'work,' (written by the author himself, alongside a significant 'autobiographical' excerpt from Baumgartner's own writings) there is much attention paid to the retinue of 'normal' people who co-occupy Baumgartner's life: his cleaner and her family, the meter-reader, who becomes a distant friend, his new girlfriend (who leaves to pursue greener pastures in California) and the families of both himself and Anna, as well as significant, if ineffable encounters with strangers which, as it goes, occupy a notable space in the hero's consciousness even many years later. The question of their presence: why do certain persons hold so much room in our memory even if the time spent together was fleeting, or seemingly insignificant––is a cohesive point of access to some of the greater themes of the book. Simultaneously, I argue, it allows readers familiar with Auster's previous works to articulate bright lines in how this project is both a culmination of and deviation from his other writing.  
Stylistically, at first glance, many may not categorize Baumgartner alongside Auster's two most famous texts, to date: The New York Trilogy and The Invention of Solitude. More on that later. For now, it suffices to say that the style is crisp, clear, and grounded in realism, even at its most surrealistic moments. Auster, at the novel's bookends, puts decided efforts into illustrating the intelligence of his hero. Rather than simply articulating his puppy crush on the UPS woman, who has been delivering books the professor has no use for simply as an occasion for human contact, he describes the woman's "radiant vigilance, or else...quite simply the power of an illuminated selfhood, human aliveness in all its vibratory splendor emanating from within to without in a complex, interlocking dance of feeling and thought" (emphasis original). Baumgartner's fall is punctuated, not only with a cry in pain, but a mediation over whether the sensation and mental cognition which accompanies falling qualifies as a "true thought:" "he is still conscious, for a number of disconnected thoughts bouncing around in his head, even if those thoughts are dim and incomprehensible to him, which would disqualify them as true thoughts, he supposes, and relegate them to the category of almost-thoughts or non-thoughts..." (emphasis mine). But much of the text (granted, perhaps not its most impressive moments) is lucid, extraordinarily clear and vivid, precise in terms of diction, and the whole novel itself can be suitably classified as 'slice of life' with no condescension to either audience or author.
What comes across as most intriguing, here, in candid terms, is the recurring paradox of simultaneous discernment and its opposite, lack of recognition (a classical trope, blindness and sight, although seemingly divorced from its own roots, or else cleverly displacing expectations in these terms of origin). One would suspect that Baumgartner, as a former athlete himself, would be more sympathetic to his over-talkative meter-reader, whose dreams of being a professional baseball player were dashed out by an ill-timed injury. It is apparent they both have distinct qualities in common: frustrations over a given name (Seymour Baumgartner, the professor, goes by 'Sy,' and publishes under his initials 'S.T.'––perhaps a closeness and distance from the canon described above, where Baumgartner is an avatar of a cultural tradition upon which Auster himself may have struggled to find comfortable footing), and failed athletic ventures from their childhood/early adulthood. Yet Baumgartner laments the "meandering irrelevancies" of this character, Ed Papadopoulos, unable to appreciate his humanity at all until after the meter-reader pulls him up from the darkness of the basement after the protagonist's ill-fated tumble (the novel's 'inciting incident,' to use a formalistic term which seems entirely inappropriate here: even a sidewise symbol of 'rebirth' or 'resurrection' for those looking for it). Baumgartner becomes enmeshed as a distant but significant friend of the young man, buying him and his newlywed wife "elaborate dinners at the area's best Chinese, Mexican, and Italian restaurants." All of our hero's efforts ultimately come across as a bit hollow, as unfulfilled attempts at establishing authentic connection, which are fraught by factors related to capital, and his social/economic orientation in the scenario. It is the same with the family of his cleaner, Mrs. Flores. When Mr. Flores accidentally cuts off two of his fingers during a job off-screen, early in the novel (an accident, which the protagonist imagines as happening "at the precise moment he...was burning his hand on the pot"––another rhetorical move asserting the primacy of accidents, and coincidence, an apparent theme of Auster's later work), his daughter, Rosita, calls the aging professor, and he comforts her. His most endearing trait, truly, the greatest testament to Baumgartner's status as an empathetic person, comes from his recognizing that speaking to this scared child, and making her laugh "almost [certainly] will stand as the single most important thing he [accomplishes] all day." 
Despite this, lapses of empathy, or authentic connection, are a substantial focus of the narrative. Baumgartner convinces Ed P. to swallow his pride and join his father's landscaping company, but apparently never quite breaks through in his relationship with his own father (a relationship which holds a special place in a careful reader's attention, knowing not only Auster's writing on the subject in The Invention of Solitude, but also his deep indebtedness to Kafka, which is on display at various points in this text) in terms of authentic connection. By the novel's latter chapters, Ed P.'s landscapers and Mr. Flores's working crew move around Baumgartner's house like "two gangs on...overlapping turfs." The protagonist's professor friend calling young scholar Beatrix Cohen "one of us" (in this case, referring to the sense of academic and cultural background, but noteworthy also insofar as Jewish heritage comes to bear on this work (another significant through-line between Auster and Kafka, it should be noted)) only further cements this disconnect. Similarly, the depth of connection with Baumgartner's wife, Anna, is contrasted through the relationship with his girlfriend, Judith, a staple of his life for two years previous to the text, and a relationship managed and scheduled in a way which makes the dissolution in this case feel inevitable (if, for no other reason, for the tendency of things in this narrative to go wrong, as a matter of course––not necessarily through fault, but as if dictated by the very fates themselves, or circumstantial happenstance). Rather than personal compatibility, it is macro-level factors which prevent this relationship from becoming more intimate and serious (age difference, professional goals, previous relationship dynamics, etc), but there is still a lingering sense that the text at its most essential is interested in exploring intimacy, and how it is deterministically and/or circumstantially experienced, as a matter which is somehow exceedingly and inexplicably simple, and paradoxically, to the point of utter frustration, complicated.
This notion of paradox, of an incompleteness of understanding, although demonstrated with greater subtlety in this case, than, say, Auster's magnum opus The New York Trilogy, still manages to demonstrate why Auster's literary legacy ought be cemented in the manner I have described earlier, as the very best among us. There are many examples of this to choose from. One may look outright into how the "doubleness of being" is described as the subject of Baumgartner's early work––a literal demonstration of this phenomena at play. Anna's story recounting her meeting Seymour, S.T., includes a description of her being "both hot and cold at the same time" after escaping a mugging, and, later, he finds himself musing that Anna and Judith have "nothing in common, [which] still confounds him, but instead of interpreting it as yet another sign of his flawed and incoherent approach to life, he now sees that nothing as a positive force" (emphasis mine). Most of the technical qualities of the novel can be understood in terms of this gradient, from explicitness to mere suggestion (for those with the requisite knowledge, one of us, in artibus), or the lingering hint of suggestion. For example, there is an explicit reference to the literary tradition (also, seemingly a comment on the force of literature itself) when describing Baumgartner's mother's struggles for independence in the wake of family trauma: "[these circumstances] to Baumgartner only proved, for the ten trillionth time...that we are all dependent on one another and that no person, not even the most isolated person among us, can survive without the help of others. As in the case of Robinson Crusoe, who would have perished if Friday hadn't shown up to rescue him." And yet other cases are less obvious, and (perhaps, like the nature of unconscious influence, or the very melancholia which makes up a significant theme in this work) must be read sidewise to orient the technique as an allusion at all, and not merely a particular construction on the part of an original author, doing original work. One such case that stands out happens early, when our hero is lamenting over the scorched pot (which, we discover, is one of the few keepsakes of his courtship to Anna not boxed up or put away, besides her writing room itself, which remains essentially unchanged). Auster describes the scene, and her memory as a living thing: "she is still there in the house with him, lurking somewhere close by, but always just beyond the frame of his vision, and then she burst in on him that miserable afternoon in April as he sat at the kitchen table looking at the blackened egg boiler on the floor, the one thing he hadn't bothered to get rid of, and rather than welcome the chance to spend some time drifting along with Anna, he had kicked her away, expelling her with such brutal, unthinking vehemence that he was appalled by what he had done." Reminiscent of Hamlet, is it not? An inverted, and truncated reference? The (non-exhaustive) scope of the allusions, straight-forward or otherwise, which I noted in the margins of my copy perhaps says more about my own orientation as a reader than Auster's long-standing project, but they are nothing to balk at: Oedipus and the Sphinx's Riddle, Dostoyevsky and the Rabbi in The Brother's K., Freudian notions of melancholy and ambivalence, enough of Kafka to warrant its own discussion on the matter, and significant intersections with the other works of Auster I am familiar with. That is, the description of rooms and routines in The Invention of Solitude, and an abiding interest in film which is the subject of another of his novels, The Book of Illusions. Fittingly, the most profound moment of this novel comes in such a way as to embody this technique of paradox, by subtly yet forcefully pushing back against the realism of the narrative itself.
The most palpable moment in Baumgartner comes as a buzzing in the night. A light sound from another room. Our hero goes to investigate, finding himself in Anna's writing room. He notes the objects on her desk, a "lump of misshapen concrete from the Berlin Wall" and "the rugged shard of an ammonite fossil more than a million years old that she accidentally kicked up from the ground during a long-ago trek...in south-central France." I will take the moment to re-iterate the rhetorical quality here: the unspoken assertion that the great forces of existence, preservation, and longevity (indeed, beauty, sublimity, perhaps subjectivity itself) are foremost the product of happenstance, coincidence, and have little concrete rationale to speak of. The telephone in this room rings: "the discontinued telephone that cannot ring but nevertheless has rung and continues to ring still." On the other side of the line is Seymour Tecumseh Baumgartner's (our hero's middle name is a political statement from his inept yet ideologically radical father) deceased wife, Anna Blume. "...Anna is talking to him, talking to him with the same resonant voice that belonged to her when she was alive, addressing him as darling and my darling man, explaining to him that death is not what anyone had ever imagined it was, that the two of them and all the other materialists had been wrong to assume there is no afterlife but that the afterlives of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, and all the others have gotten it wrong as well." What follows is the most beautiful, seemingly acute and fixedly accurate (if such a term is appropriate) description of death I have ever read in literature. I will not do the disservice of repeating it here, as in the ancient taboo against representing again that which is truly sacred. I will instead quote the conjecture, which playfully re-imagines the now centuries old literary ideal of preservation (akin to the martyr, or saint complex) through death via remembrance: "she suspects that he is the one who is sustaining her through this incomprehensible afterlife, this paradoxical state of conscious non-existence, which must and will come to and end at some point, she feels, but as long as he is alive and still able to think about her, her consciousness will continue to be awakened and reawakened by his thoughts." My literary and scholarly work reaches deeply into this very subject, but it feels useless to bring out the literature at present, rather than to emphasize, as Baumgartner does, the seeming status of this assertion "not [as] a scientific truth, perhaps, not a verifiable truth, but an emotional truth, which in the long run is the only thing that really counts." A more explicit rhetorical assertion, which also speaks to the deconstruction, in this scene, of the 'magical realism' of the text against its seemingly materialistic, realistic framing––a fitting quality which also tells us something significant about phenomenology, I would argue, and what we ought to qualify as 'real' in the first place. 
I would like to briefly discuss politics in this book, then muse a bit longer about duality, before leaving off. Maybe you'll permit me a natural tangent (an experiment, whose value we can discover together), which I could not fit into the earlier mention of allusions. There appears to be an interesting parallel between the final stanza of the character Anna's poem (her earliest in the collection which was published posthumously by Baumgartner) and a famous poem by Hadrian, which he supposedly wrote on his deathbed:
First, Anna's poem (excerpt):
Where to now Mrs. Dolittle
and if you are gone forever
would someone please tell me
why that tiny imp of a man
is grinning at me from across the street
with a microscopic red something in his buttonhole
gleaming like a lit match in the dark. 

And then Hadrian's:
Little soul little stray
little drifter
now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things
(this poem is also preserved in the epigraph of my own collection, it ought to be said). Regardless of where you may fall in line with the Roman imperial system, and how it functions as a symbol of power and domination in contemporary society, there is an apparent beauty here, even if only granted by way of the parallel across millennia. Blume, of course, could be read as a homophone for Bloom, not only calling to mind flowers in blossom, but the famous literary critic, who was a "self-described Wildean" when it came to the intersection of politics and literature. Baumgartner, certainly, is insulated by a layer of privilege, which is most apparent in the aforementioned episodes of his relationship with the working-class characters who perform services for him. Money is not a point of contention in his current state of affairs, although it is clear that this hasn't always been the case. The friction of racial representation in this novel is nothing short of Derridarian: which, in this case, simply means that it functions to demonstrate the fissure points of a given cultural space, in our case, 21st century American (literary) culture. The most obvious example of this to me can be found in the sympathetic at the risk of being orientalizing representation of a young black mother and her daughter who, with quiet dignity, take a train ride in an integrated train in 1968, "two black southerners at a time when Jim Crow was still breathing even though it had been pronounced legally dead." Young Buamgartner's orientation is one which lacks understanding of their differences in terms of social status: he wonders at her having "no book, no toy to distract her from the tedium of the slowly moving train" and isn't sure if her excellent behavior is "out of pride or fear or a combination of the two," before deciding to believe the best in terms of the mother's kindness. This is followed by another memory, of a young, featureless (a long-articulated quality of cultural 'whiteness,' precluding the need for specificity by proxy of its being seen as 'normal') boy "neither scrawny nor plump, neither dark nor fair, a work in progress..." who is slapped suddenly by his father, in a fit of rage which the elder immediately reacts to with horror and shame. What is significant in this context is that these memories occur within the "indelible floatsam from the unvanished but long vanished past." Again, note the use of paradox as an organizing principle. Perhaps here our experiment will bear fruit. What if we imagine the political as this unvanished yet (soon to be) long vanished phenomena? It might explain why despite the political having a significant role to bear, from the reference to some significant dates (Baumgartner plans to ask Judith to marry him August 11th, 2018 calling to mind Sept 11, especially insofar as this effort ends in failure and rejection, and January 5th, 2020 is the date that Beatrix Cohen is expected to arrive at his house to begin her work on Anna's archive, calling to mind the attempted coup which would take place almost a year later), to outright allusions to MAGA and the (longer-running than often accounted for) violence in the Ukraine. The work is by no means politically indifferent, as attested to by Baumgartner's father's idealizing of "a new social arrangement called democratic communalism," and many intricate discussions of politics throughout the twentieth century, from the horrors of WWII to life in the late sixties, when the Vietnam War and its associated conscription (which, in a roundabout way, leads to the death of Anna's first love, Frankie Boyle) were inescapable realities which had to be mediated in one way or another. All of this said, and true to the literary tradition from which Auster is following, despite an apparent political positioning, the text itself conceives of its own politics in terms of duality (in this case, participation and non-participation).
Duality, duality. It seems insufficient to describe what is significant in this novel (or any great literary work, for that matter)––as merely encompassed by this technique. Yet the persistence of this is so wide in its scope as to be nearly-ubiquitous, a totalizing force with significant rhetorical implications. Baumgartner describes the "living death" of his father who, like Kafka to a significant capacity, selflessly sticks around to support his family despite his own ambitions. There is also the scene where the protagonist has to act as a stand-in for his seamstress mother, wearing a wedding dress and joking about auditioning for a theatrical rendition of Some Like It Hot. "And there I was in Suzan Schwartzman's wedding dress, laughing my head off because I felt so embarrassed and confused..." The physical object of the wedding dress, in a Butlerian sense, reveals something of the psychic androgyny of the character, or author, or universal condition, depending on how you read things (which can of course be traced back through to Freud and Plato and even further if you're very clever and enterprising in this regard). Something of the sexual androgyny of our hero comes across in the novel's repeated attempts at embodying the deceased character Anna Blume's sexuality and desire, in both her courtship with Baumgartner and her early childhood romance with Frankie Boyle. 
It is this very sense of interconnectedness which carries the emotional weight of this novel, more than any other particulars. There is a real sense, spoken obliquely, but also in outright terms, of Anna's death entailing a sort of death of Baumgartner himself, from which he is reborn, or resurrected, while she only exists in a spectral/hallucinatory form in his consciousness. We are briefly shown an episode of our hero standing off, defiantly, with a grief counsellor, stating boldly "life is dangerous...and anything can happen to us at any moment. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that––and if they don't, well, they haven't been paying attention, and if you don't pay attention, you're not fully alive." This is exactly Baumgartner's condition throughout the text. As mentioned, the very inciting incident of the novel itself comes from a significant lapse of attention. If I recall correctly, Auster gave a final interview in the Paris Review regarding this book, and stated that the inspiration for the text was an image that shows up on pages 48-9 of my modest hardcover edition. This scene turns out to be Anna's funeral, where Baumgartner's friend "wrapped his right arm around [Baumgartner's] body to make sure he didn't fall down...because it looked like...he would topple into the grave himself." This, symbolically, gets right to the heart of the matter. It is not only being as such which is governed by dualism, oriented most foundationally in terms of paradox, but also non-being, which not only encroaches on our living existence in austere and unpleasant ways, but is also the very means through which we are preserved beyond the short span of our lives. This, at least, is the rhetorical assertion which Auster's text so dynamically suggests, and, for a careful reader, seems a fitting culmination of a half-century's work in literary practice, study, and translation. The movement from the early masterpieces, with their emphasis on enclosed rooms and solitary genius, is a far cry from this text which seems utterly convinced of human interconnectivity: "that we are all dependent on one another and that no person...can survive without the help of others." And yet the through lines are substantial, and worthy of study for those interested in the development of postmodern literature into the twenty-first century.
What seems to supersede these minutiae, and lead to the emotional truth of the matter, is the sense that Seymour and Anna are both dualistic aspects of the author himself. On the one hand is the dispassionate, intellectual theorist who seeks to precisely capture phenomena as a matter of coherent and clarifying articulation; on the other, the artist, who knows that it is the sense of things, not things as they actually are, which is what stays with us in the stories we tell, how we love, and what we have to give others. The characters share certain qualities: clumsiness, hard-headed assurance in their own ability, and a measure of introspection which does not interfere with their ultimate vocations, but does seem to set them apart from fully identifying as 'workers' in any significant sense. Is it possible for a literary work to be reduced in such a capacity? Would it not be better to settle for something of a "both/and ; neither/nor" settlement in conclusion of this matter? I cannot, despite myself, conclude in this discussion with any certainty at all. But I do know, from my previous study of Auster's work, that it is important to mediate the personal with the material one uses in writing, as a general matter. Shortly after picking up this book, I was speaking with my dad about it and he asked me outright, "Who is Paul Auster?" I answered as well as I could, "He is a postmodern American author. One of the best writers of the twentieth century." And instead of giving a reply, or asking me to succinctly explain the history of postmodernism, my father merely grunted and walked away, or veered the subject onto something else, as he is wont to do. As mentioned, Kafka plays quietly in the background of much of this text. I found the letter from Baumgartner's father to his son a sort of inverted reference to the famous Letter to my Father. And, still, further, there is matter of making sense of my own lost loves and stillborn continued existence, and parallels with literary figures, including and most especially Franz K., whose vocation I am now obliquely participating in, with as much constraint and balance as I am capable of mustering, or perhaps which anyone could. The only other time, besides the fantastical dream phone call, in which Auster's text threatens to unravel is a brief reference to Baumgartner's own story, "Life Sentence," in the final chapter, where the fictional seems to momentarily colonize the real, after some practical writing advice (put your book away and forget about it, before editing), and as a reminiscence almost: "one of the many lessons learned over the years by the old lifer still serving out his sentence in the last occupied cell on the third floor of Correctional Facility No. 7." His reference is purely introspective, and seems to preclude the continuation of literature itself, insofar as his is the "last occupied cell." That may be too simplistic, yet if we were to imagine literature as we know it as an institutional construction which is currently being divested from to the point of starvation, it may well contain a kernel of truth. Will literature continue to survive after the deaths of its Baumgartners and Blumes, or is it simply that they cannot conceive of a life except through the narrow chord of a telephone line, whispering how things were in the bygone era? Whatever the case, I devour Auster's novel over the course of two days, or maybe three. There are day to day matters to attend to: meandering discussions with my father, friendships and relationships which I am attempting to maintain, and the world continues to burn and hold the knife to its own throat. It takes me most of my Sunday to write up this review, and I feel essentially confident in its qualities, though, following the advice above the aforementioned quote, I will give myself a day or two to check for any glaring grammatical errors. One of the more daunting aspects of this venture is thinking of the twelve reviews which Anna pens in her whole life, and the scope and scale of each of their work more generally. There are still matters which I have yet to discuss, but I have already greatly exceeded my planned word count. As an academic and intellectual, both the phantom limb metaphor and the car as an metaphysical symbol for the soul in the fake study Mysteries of the Wheel aren't entirely convincing, or are imprecise to a fault, or something akin to that. But these are just fictions, and with so much talk about paradox and duality––it makes enough sense that Baumgartner could himself be an accomplished and capable thinker, who in this point in his life is creating works which pale in comparison to his major accomplishments. But still, there comes the matter of how to end all of this. Who am I writing this review for, even, now that Auster has passed and the novel has already been released for some time, and will surely be able to exist as it stands without my intervention. What is there left to say? Luckily, I have already conceived that the ending should be taken from that story, "Life Sentence," so clearly inspired by "Before the Law," which follows Baumgartner's tepid yet decisive rejection following his proposal to Judith:
After fifty-plus years of quickly passing days, it feels as if my life has rushed by in a 
blur. I have become old, but because the days have passed so quickly, most of me 
still feels young, and as long as I can still hold a pencil in my hand and still see the 
sentence in front of me, I suppose I will carry on with the same routine I have been 
following since the morning I arrived here. And if a moment should finally come 
when I can no longer carry on, all I have to do it get up and leave. If I am too old to 
walk by then, I will ask my jailer to help me. I am sure he will be glad to see me go.