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“Life becomes death,” wrote Paul Auster in the first paragraph of his first prose book: The invention of loneliness (1982) “and it is as if this death had possessed this life all along. Death without warning. That means: life stops. And it could stop at any moment.”
Auster, who has died aged 77 of complications from lung cancer, was a writer since his breakthrough who combined popular appeal with playful experimentation in three decades of fiction The New York Trilogy (1987) to his last novel, Baumgartner (2023).
He once said that a novel about his life would be called The ups and downs and long, varied career of PA, but there were more ups than downs. Auster was born on February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey into a middle-class Jewish family. A defining event in his childhood (“something I never got over”) occurred at the age of 14, when he was caught in a lightning storm; A boy just inches away was struck by lightning and killed. It was an incident he returned to in his memoirs and novels.
Auster decided to become a writer, he told the Paris Review in 2003, “about a year after I realized I wasn’t going to be a major league baseball player.” In 1971, a year after graduating from Columbia University, he and his then-girlfriend Lydia Davis, now known for her short stories, moved to Paris, where they made a living as translators – of catalogs and screenplays as well as poetry and fiction work on their own writing.
They returned to New York and married in 1974, and Auster made increasingly desperate attempts to make money – including trying to sell a card game he had invented about baseball – as recorded in his memoirs From Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997).
In 1982 he married another writer, the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt, and in 1987 The New York Trilogy was published. It comprised three novellas, the first of which (City of glass) clarified Auster’s approach to combining storytelling with strangeness in his introductory words. “It started with a wrong number, the phone rang three times in the middle of the night and the voice on the other end asked for someone who wasn’t him.”
The stories in the trilogy – one of them featuring a character named Paul Auster – were, in the words of John Updike, “exquisitely dark literary games” (“Kafka makes Wellingtons,” as Auster’s editor put it) and took a postmodern kitchen sink approach to fiction : throw everything in, distort the reader’s perception, mix reality and fiction.
Making a virtue of necessity, Auster later said: “So many strange things have happened in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, that I am no longer sure I know what reality is.”
In the novels that followed, something of the “complete randomness” of this childhood lightning strike remained: the Beckettian absurdism of The music of chance (1990), where two men build a meaningless wall; Leviathan (1992), about a man who blows himself up with a homemade bomb.
After a successful period he wrote screenplays, including smoke And Blue in the face (both 1995), in later works Auster’s appetite for both page-turning realism and Art Nouveau experimentalism became increasingly divided into separate works, each satisfying competing impulses. Novels like The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and Invisible (2009) were direct storytelling and took a refreshing walk in the external world while being reflexive at the same time Traveling in the scriptorium (2006), a man named Mr. Blank was stuck in a room reading a manuscript with oyster characters from previous books.
As the number of characters scribbling in notebooks in his novels attests, Auster was very interested in the process of writing itself. He said he was “intimidated” by computer keyboards and preferred to write by hand. “You feel like the words are coming out of your body, and then you bury the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”
Auster was part of a network of book kings: friends of Peter Carey, Don DeLillo and JM Coetzee, an integral part of the New York literary scene. In many ways he became a celebrity, as impressive in person as he was on the page, with his face (the adjectives “saturnine” or “handsome” were used variously) protruding from the back – sometimes the front – of his books . The playfulness in his fiction sometimes went even further: in Leviathanhis narrator Peter Aaron married Iris Vegan, the narrator of Hustvedt’s 1992 novel The blindfold.
His work enjoyed great popularity in Europe – in 2007 he was appointed Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture – although he claimed to view this success with suspicion, fearing that it would portray him as pretentious or “pretentious.” “It’s irritating,” he told the Financial Times in 2017, “because all my books have been about America.”
Although he turned to non-fiction late in his career – Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021) and Bloodbath Nation (2023), a polemic about guns in the USA – Auster has never lost faith in fiction. “A novel,” he said, “is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet in absolute intimacy.”
In 2022, Auster’s son with Davis, Daniel, died of a drug overdose, not long after his infant daughter was found dead by his side.
In March 2023, Hustvedt announced on social media that Auster had been diagnosed with cancer three months earlier. He leaves behind Hustvedt and their daughter Sophie.