Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster

Abstract

Reviewed by: Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster Carleigh Smith (bio) Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane, by Paul Auster. New York: Henry Holt, 2022. 800 pp. Cloth, $35.00; Paperback, $29.00; Ebook, $29.99. Paul Auster’s Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane takes on the significant task of constructing a biography of Stephen Crane and analyzing his major and minor works. In a text that is at once detailed and sweeping, Auster writes to expose those unfamiliar with Crane’s writing to the breadth and interest of his works, to assess how Crane’s style developed into its objective, vibrant realism, and to explore Crane’s relevance for contemporary readers. Although it is not a formal criticism, Auster’s work is valuable both as a biography and literary analysis. Yet it offers its most significant contributions in its discussion of Crane’s works, which are contextualized with his life, correspondence, and contemporary accounts and reviews. The text is divided into the chronological periods of Crane’s life, with subchapters marking each significant biographical or literary subject. Crane’s relevance, Auster argues, can be seen in his depiction of life’s enduring uncertainties and in his exploration of how experiences shape the conception of what is relative and real about ourselves and our societies. A focal point of Auster’s discussion is how Crane’s style is marked by tracing an idea as it “shuttles back and forth across the boundary between what is legible and illegible, the dividing line between coherence and a blur, . . . that place of indeterminacy, where the subjective and the objective merge” (408). To do this, Auster addresses Crane’s psychological realism, impressionism, and perspective not as self-contained frameworks but in conjunction with the works’ historical and thematic ideas. This creates a reading that is as technically astute as it is casual, original, and exploratory. Notably, Auster reads Crane with the joint sense of exploring his works for the first time—an experience that is enjoyable, demanding, and sometimes bewildering—and with a profound sense for how these initial [End Page 97] impressions are grounded in the text and so become the keys to understanding Crane as the master of melding the arresting impression with the mundane circumstance. Auster’s major chapter, covering the prolific New York period, “The Pace of Youth,” reveals how Crane’s writing developed alongside his maturity as a man, even, as Auster argues, Crane’s writing growth outpaced this personal evolution. Assessing Crane’s short story of the same title, Auster notes that in creating biography, there is the reality that “the man and the artist are not the same person” (73). Because Auster presents Crane’s life in the context of close readings of his literature, he develops insights without reading the fiction simply as a biographical supplement. For example, in “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” Crane’s secretive relationship with Cora naturally transforms him into a representation of Potter. Here, Auster creates a broader reading of Crane’s divided persona as the mature and impulsive man, finding that “Crane was Scratchy Wilson, and Crane was Jack Potter” (553). Exploring the tensions between history and artistry in ways that retain the details of the text but allow for creative biographical ties is one of the supreme strengths of Auster’s writing. Auster also thoughtfully handles the tensions implied in Crane’s ethnic biases, providing a balanced conclusion that Crane’s failing to understand the Other is not the outflow of malice but the result of his perceptive laziness and assimilation of his society’s ingrained prejudices. However, the racism implied within some of the Mexican stories, particularly “One Dash—Horses” and “The Five White Mice,” would have benefited from a discussion about how they reflect Auster’s idea that Crane’s attitude renders those outside his culture “inscrutable,” as Auster notes in his analysis of “Above All Things” (233). One of the most rewarding parts of Auster’s study is his comparative readings. With an acute sense for Crane’s use of tone, diction, and perspective, Auster traces interrelationships between Crane’s style and...