Brooklyn’s bard: Paul Auster’s tricksy fiction captivated a generation
Paul Auster was literary Brooklyn’s first great pinup. Photograph: Timothy Fadek/Corbis/Getty
Like Saul Bellow’s Chicago or Philip Roth’s New Jersey, the American writer Paul Auster will always be synonymous with Brooklyn. He was “the patron saint of literary Brooklyn” according to the headline in the New York Times tribute after his death this week. Long before Brooklyn became a byword for aspiring young novelists, Auster made the borough his own with his breakout collection The New York Trilogy, first published in 1987. While Auster may have chafed against its enduring success, the trilogy is the work for which he will be most remembered. Anyone with bookish pretensions who came of age in the 1980s will have a battered copy somewhere on their shelves. City of Glass, the lead story, was rejected 17 times before it was published as a freestanding novel in 1985.
Famously prolific, Auster averaged a book annually until his final novel Baumgartner, about an octogenarian author, was published at the end of last year (he also wrote the text for a book of photographs, Bloodbath Nation, about mass shootings in the US, published at the beginning of last year). He was as versatile as he was prodigious – able to turn his hand as elegantly to non-fiction, translation, poetry and screenplays. As the American writer Rachel Kushner says, “from translating Maurice Blanchot early in his career, to shaping what fiction could be, in the New York Trilogy, which every writer of my generation read, absorbed, and in some sense, responded to, to writing, suddenly, and late in life, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane, Auster shows us what it means to be endlessly curious, ambitious, and above all, literary.”
Auster’s memoirs include The Invention of Solitude (1982), a meditation on fatherhood following his father’s death; Hand to Mouth (1997), about being young and broke as a writer; and Winter Journal (2012), about getting old and broken. In the 1990s, he also wrote three films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed.
But it is as a short-story writer and novelist that he earned his reputation as one of the most inventive American writers of his generation, with acclaimed works including Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990) and The Book of Illusions (2002) – the zaniness of his plots defies neat summary. Considered something of a “rock star” in France, Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991. At home he was part of an American literary elite – with close friends including Don DeLillo, Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie.
“He was a person of his own,” Orhan Pamuk wrote by email, a friend since they met in 1991. “I have a lot of respect and admiration for his work.” His first wife was the short-story writer Lydia Davis, his second Siri Hustvedt, his first reader and editor since they married in 1982. “I can’t think of a single instance when I haven’t followed her advice,” he told the Paris Review in 2003. (With typical meta-playfulness, the narrator of his 1992 novel Leviathan, Peter Aaron, shares his initials and his wife is called Iris – Siri spelled backwards.)
“No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it,” observes Aaron in Leviathan. “Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.”
As a young writer in the late 70s, it was only when Auster stopped trying to make “Literature”, that he found the style that would become inimitably his own. “I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good,” he wrote in A Life in Words in 2017, “but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out.” And that is exactly what he did: marrying tricksy European post-modernism with hard-boiled American noir, to create something dizzyingly inventive and new. Full of sly jokes, riddles and metafictional high-jinks, his work had the voltage of a thriller (offering a rare voice of disapproval, the New Yorker critic James Wood accused his works of pedalling a “B-movie atmosphere”). From his short sprints to the marathon novel 4321, which tells four versions of the same story (about a Jewish boy born in Newark in 1947 – like Auster) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, Auster was always blurring the edges between fiction and reality.
His subjects were loss, grief and identity, with versions of himself (in various degrees of disguise) popping up in his fiction, along with references to 19th-century American writers, notebooks and baseball (until he was 17, he only wanted to be a baseball player), all of which he loved.
He would write “one paragraph at time”, always beginning each novel in longhand – he favoured notebooks with quadrille lines (those little squares). “Every book begins with the first sentence and then I push on until I’ve reached the last. Always in sequence, a paragraph at a time,” he told the Paris Review. Once he was satisfied with the paragraph he would type it up. Until the last 15 years, when an assistant would type it up on a computer, he would do it himself on the Olympia typewriter he bought from a college friend in 1974 (he wrote about it in his 2002 book with the painter Sam Messer, The Story of My Typewriter). He called the act of typing “reading with my fingers”, constantly editing and revising as he went along.
“So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore,” he said back in 2003 and his was certainly a life bookmarked by dramatic interventions. On a camping trip when was 14, the boy next to him was struck by lightning. Standing next to a boy “who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world”, he told the Guardian last year, in one of his last interviews. It also influenced how he wrote: he used the incident in both a short story and in 4321. His family was struck by tragedy recently, with the deaths of his granddaughter and later his son.
For Auster writing was an act of faith, and one which he continued to serve right up until the end. “You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth and you’d rather cut off your right arm than break that promise.”