His Master’s Voice

On the cover of Paul Auster’s latest novel, “Timbuktu,” half the face of a dog peers out at the prospective buyer, daring him or her to take it home. The face is blurry, the focus as indistinct as the pedigree--a mutt of a photo. A book about a dog, it seems to say. And yet, there are dog books and there are dog books--hearty canines from Jack London, over-bred varietals like “Millie’s Book: As Dictated to Barbara Bush” and kennels full of child-friendly puppies, from Eric Hill’s “Spot” to Sheila Burnford’s classic “The Incredible Journey.” Some of the finest writers in the English language have paper-trained their dogs, from Virginia Woolf with her story of Elizabeth Barrett’s “Flush” to John Berger and his “King.” Everyone, as Geoffrey Rush’s Elizabethan producer says in “Shakespeare in Love,” likes a bit with a dog.

But Auster’s entry is a mixed breed that defies easy categorization.

“Timbuktu” opens on a gloomy Sunday morning. A mutt who answers to the name of Mr. Bones waits patiently on the edge of a road between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, while his master, Willy, coughs up bloody sputum onto his wild beard. Willy G. Christmas ne Willy Gurevitch is a former Columbia University student who, like an unfortunate few in the Leary-sparked ‘60s, ended a youthful acid trip with a descent into debilitating schizophrenia. Discovered by his roommate (Willy can’t remember whether his name was Auster or Omster) “buck naked on the floor--chanting names from the Manhattan phone book and eating a bowl of his own excrement,” Willy was sent to a hospital, from which he was released into the care of his aging mother. Six months later, weaned from drugs to alcohol, Willy had his epiphany. Bleary-eyed from too much TV and bourbon, Willy was flipping through the channels one Christmas Eve when Santa Claus came on and spoke directly to him, to his soul.

Taking on the new surname (and a tricolored tattoo of Mr. Claus on his right arm), Willy set off on the road to preach the gospel of Christmas. After a few seasons of saintly heroism, tempered by the scars of knifings and beatings, Willy adopted a four-legged companion. Thanks to Willy’s manic logorrhea, Mr. Bones has not only heard enough of his master’s voice to dictate a passable biography but has learned enough “Ingloosh” to understand the human race, if not how to communicate on the level, say, of Doctor Dolittle’s canine friend, Jip.

Willy not only speaks to Mr. Bones but believes that his dog understands and that that understanding means he has a soul. Willy reasons that “if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach that soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs--at least dogs of Mr. Bones’ caliber--would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? . . . If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn’t respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?”

And so Willy spends an entire winter constructing a Symphony of Smells for Mr. Bones to perform, painting scents on sequences of cardboard boxes, urine-soaked rags and “a tunnel whose walls had been smeared with the traces of a meatball-and-spaghetti dinner.” Like all Willy’s projects, the Symphony of Smells fails to bring in the fame and fortune that Willy expects. “It might not have served any purpose,” the straight-shooting philosophe Mr. Bones opines, “but the truth was that it was fun.”

But Willy’s masterwork is words. These words survive in 74 notebooks of writings, including the first 1,800 lines of an epic-in-progress titled “Vagabond Days,” which themselves are living in a rental locker in the Greyhound bus terminal in Baltimore. Within his delusion, Willy understands that his best chance at immortality requires that he deliver the key to the locker to Mrs. Bea Swanson, Willy’s former high school English teacher, whom he hasn’t seen in 25 years. And it is to find Mrs. Swanson that Willy and Mr. Bones make their hajj to Baltimore.

Willy’s pilgrimage finishes short, however, as he collapses only 2 1/2 blocks from the Greyhound station, at 203 N. Amity St., for three years of the 19th century the residence of Edgar Allan Poe. To Mr. Bones’ semi-educated ear, there is little difference between the Poland that nurtured Willy’s Gurevitch ancestors and the Poe-land where the dying Willy will breathe his last. Yet there is one word that Mr. Bones is certain he understands--Timbuktu.

Timbuktu is the Big Rock Candy Mountain of this late-century breed of hobo, the never-never land to which the tubercular Willy is inevitably bound. Following logic, Mr. Bones reasons that “it seemed only right that he should be allowed to dwell in the hereafter with the same person he had loved in the here-before. . . . [I]n Timbuktu dogs would be able to speak man’s language and converse with him as an equal. That was what logic dictated, but who knew if justice or logic had any more impact on the next world than they did on this one?”

Mr. Bones soon has an opportunity to investigate the justice and logic of this world as he escapes from the police who are bent on evicting the unconscious Willy from his Poe-land stoop. He gallops off on an incredible journey of his own through the suburbs and countryside surrounding the nation’s capital. Along the way, Mr. Bones is taken in by the 10-year-old son of a Chinese restaurateur and, later, the 12-year-old daughter of a depressed suburban housewife. As he receives kindnesses and cruelties from his new masters, Mr. Bones comes to learn how complex and dangerous is the highway that separates the lives of the well from the lives of the ill; how wonderful and terrible is the navigation of that road, in that “venerable, time-honored” sport of dogs, dodge-the-car.

Auster has made a big-hearted search throughout his career for the poetry in the lost souls of his contemporaries, from Columbia and other parts, who came of age in the ‘60s at the cost of their minds. His sense of smell has been matched only by his fearless ear for the sad truths of the fragile--that they ultimately have no greater gift for language than the healthy. And yet, as he shows so simply in “Timbuktu,” their need for words in their imprisoned monologues and their capacity for love may be as unbounded and unspoken as, say, a dog’s.