BAUMGARTNER, by Paul Auster

I can hear the whingeing already: Nothing happens in this novel. It’s too slow, it’s boring, it’s not high concept or high event. And in a nod to how conditioned we — or at least I — have become to expect high event, I spent the first 25 pages of “Baumgartner” waiting for its namesake to be kidnapped, maimed or just locked in a closet by the meter man. When it was clear this just wasn’t going to be that kind of novel, I had to start over.

What kind of a novel is “Baumgartner,” then? It’s lovely. It’s sweet. It’s odd. But maybe not so odd for Auster fans who will immediately want to locate “Baumgartner” in his body of work (he’s written 20 novels) and to look for leitmotifs and signature moves. There are plenty. For starters, we’ve got a bookish and earnest male protagonist and author’s proxy (Auster is a family name in the novel). We’ve got narrative instabilities that have us reading closely from Baumgartner’s point of view and then from some offstage “Pigs in Space”-type narrator’s: “Perhaps this odd confabulation will help the reader understand our hero’s state of mind at that particular moment.” Auster also splices in poems and pieces written by Baumgartner and his dead wife, Anna; forays into their past; and extended metaphors that require some unpacking. So it’s definitely a Paul Auster novel. Albeit more tender and less playful than some of his other work.

At its heart, “Baumgartner” is about warring states of mind. Our hero is a philosophy professor (for clarity I’ll call him Sy, as his friends do) who lost his wife nearly 10 years ago in a freak accident and has been caught between hanging on and letting go — or even pushing away — ever since. He has been severed from something essential but still feels its presence, much like the experience of phantom limb syndrome, about which Sy devotes some scholarship.

He thinks of mothers and fathers mourning their dead children, children mourning their dead parents, women mourning their dead husbands, men mourning their dead wives and how closely their suffering resembles the aftereffects of an amputation, for the missing leg or arm was once attached to a living body, and the missing person was once attached to another living person, and if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain.

Now in his early 70s, Sy has his own mortality to contend with and what the future looks like for whatever time he has left. The novel walks us through what he thinks about and, more important, how he thinks. How his thoughts assemble and fall apart, how they produce a kind of cumulative power that dissipates just as powerfully in the face of life’s little intrusions.

“Baumgartner” opens with Sy burning his hand on a pot handle, falling down the stairs and forgetting to call his sister. He’s trying to work, but the phone keeps ringing. The UPS lady shows up to deliver books Sy doesn’t want but has ordered just to ensure she comes to his door. In sum: Sy is old, lonely, frail, and his life is starred with these small events in a constellation that proves explosive enough on this morning to push him out of his emotional impasse. It also pushes the novel into gear to begin exploring and excavating Sy’s memories.

These early pages showcase some gorgeous passages about his wife. There’s a startling little piece written by her about her first love. And later, one about how she and Sy met and eventually decided to marry. The pieces read like time capsules for cultural moments like New York in the 1970s or the anguish of the Vietnam draft, and they are some of the more memorable and touching sections of the novel.

Sy contemplates new love. He turns out to be less old and frail than he seemed, and attempts a second spring. But, as in all things:

He realizes that the advancing afternoon has moved a bit more rapidly than he had thought, that the moment will soon be coming when the sun declines into an even more acute angle and the world it shines upon will be bathed in a spectral beauty of glowing, breathing things that will slowly dim and vanish into darkness when night falls.

With this, the novel begins to lose some of its urgency. Let’s call it a lull between chapters for Sy, though his final chapter is unclear. The novel doesn’t tell us where he’s going, settling instead for irresolution and ambiguity. Still, Auster leaves us with two closing metaphors for where Sy has been.

The first reiterates that grief is an inner conflict that annihilates your mind, your heart, leaving behind only the wolves of memory, trolling for ways to stay alive. The second comes in the guise of what might well be Sy’s last book, a thought experiment that uses the automobile as a proxy for “individual and collective human life”: mechanics, breakdowns, anarchy and the end of self-determination. The project is less hokey than it sounds, and it does get at how frantically Sy tries to find purchase and purpose in what may be the twilight of his time as a man of letters and an arbiter of how we are meant to make sense of the world.

There are a lot of books out there about grief, and it’s hard to say what kind of conversation “Baumgartner” is having with them — every grief is its own. Still, Sy’s experience puts me in mind of C.S. Lewis, who at 61 lost his wife to cancer, and who wrote about the loss in “A Grief Observed.” This was before Elisabeth Kübler-Ross codified grief into a famous five-stage model that’s been the subject of debate ever since. This was just one human groping his way forward, without a map. As Lewis put it: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” “Baumgartner,” for its quiet and thoughtful meandering, reads the same way.

BAUMGARTNER | By Paul Auster | Grove | 202 pp. | $27