Paul Auster (1947-2024): The New Yorker

IN PAUL AUSTER’S Man in the Dark (2008), an old man and his grand­daughter indulge in an informed and sensitive exchange of views on classic films, four in particular: Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves, 1948), Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948), and Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959). Readers might have recalled Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog crying by himself in an empty theatre watching Pather Panchali, but while high priest Bellow was one of the greatest writers of the last century, there was little sentimentality to the deconstruction of Apu in Auster. Partly because Auster didn’t see cinema merely as a novelist. Screenwriter and director, he crossed media and genre perhaps too easily, somewhat like his often ridiculous mixing of (what used to be called) high brow and low brow. Perhaps he was decidedly middlebrow as a result. But that didn’t take away from the attraction of his books. He had a rather realistic appreciation of the prevalence and significance of chance in life—unexpected things that just happened and on which lives turned.

Paul Benjamin Auster was born in Newark on February 3, 1947 into a Jewish family. His parents were unhappily married. A native of New Jersey, he would make his adopted city, New York, a character in his novels. His father Samuel was a landlord who didn’t pay his son much attention, a distant and difficult relationship explored in his memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982) written soon after Samuel’s death and some years before Auster would begin making a name for himself with City of Glass (1985), the first instalment of his New York Trilogy. Behind his obsession with violence and accidents and chance happenings that changed lives were at least two real-life tragedies: the anecdotal story of his grandmother shooting dead his grandfather, and the death of a friend by a lightning strike that missed a 14-year-old Auster by a few inches. “I’ve always been haunted by… the utter randomness of it,” he would say.

To what extent these events shaped the postmodern ‘play’ in Auster’s work may be debatable but when critics would complain about the tenuous causal links in his plots, he would defend himself, as long as he bothered, by arguing, say, that a moment could overturn the certainties of life. Life was just like that. Auster settled in Brooklyn long before it became Writers’ Haven. The space, multitudes, openness and opaqueness of New York, its paradoxes, naturally yielded to his exploration of the noir novel. There is a Depression-era undertone, or shadow, that never quite left him. His inventiveness and mixing of the cerebral with clichés didn’t endear him to everybody and James Wood, for one, had slammed the “B-movie atmosphere” that pervaded his work. Wood wasn’t the only critic who thought that among the admirable things in Auster’s fiction, “the prose is never one of them.” And yet, while he was a bestseller in the US, he was worshipped in France. Again, that may have had little to do with his living in Paris as a young man. But the Anglosphere did shortlist Auster’s 2017 novel 4321, four takes on the protagonist’s—yes, a 1947 Newark-born Jewish boy—early life, for the Man Booker.

It’s possible that the problem was the fact that Auster was an arch postmodernist. Mixing the sublime and the profane was an act of faith. It’s also possible that he tried to do too many things, not least directing a follow-up to Smoke (1995) which had starred William Hurt and Harvey Keitel. He also directed Lulu on the Bridge (1998) about a saxophonist (Keitel) hit by a stray bullet in a club, which flopped commercially and critically. His last novel, Baumgartner, came out last year and reiterated the Auster motifs—a bookworm protagonist, personal loss and coming to terms with it. Auster didn’t quite agree with the consensus that The New York Trilogy is his greatest work but City of Glass, about a grief-stricken mystery writer mistaken for a private detective because of a wrong number, who then assumes the detective’s identity and eventually loses his mind, remains his defining work of fiction. The detective’s name, of course, is Paul Auster.

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Sudeep Paul

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