Paul Auster, screenwriter and novelist best known for The New York Trilogy – obituary
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Paul Auster, who has died aged 77, was one of the few novelists to combine postmodernism with popular appeal in works such as The New York Trilogy and The Music of Chance.
Auster wrote short, dreamlike novels in which his protagonists would battle their way through surreal events to be confronted by the realisation that life is meaningless, motivation impossible to fathom and human beings’ sense of their own identity a fragile illusion.
Such work was hardly designed to command a large public, and the first volume of The New York Trilogy was turned down by 17 publishers. And yet, by the standards of avant-garde fiction, his books became enormously popular, enjoying such cult status among groovy but indigent young intellectuals that shops had to keep his works in a locked cupboard as they were so frequently stolen.
Some of his fans would be better described as worshippers: one enthusiast from Turkey flyposted the streets of Brooklyn with requests to meet Auster and present him with a box of Turkish cigars.
The writer became part of a fashionable literary set that included Don DeLillo and Salman Rushdie (they attended baseball games together) and with his saturnine good looks formed one half of intellectual New York’s most glamorous couple, alongside his second wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt. By the mid-1990s they had become so modish that they were asked to model clothes in an advert for Gap. (They declined.)
Auster’s work abounded in doppelgangers, mirrors, coincidences and cryptic references to his own life. Sudden life-altering events often featured: unsurprisingly in the work of somebody who, aged 14, had witnessed another boy inches away from him being killed by a lightning strike.
It was a more benign stroke of fate that prompted Auster, at the time a struggling poet and memoirist, to embark seriously on the writing of fiction as he approached his forties. City of Glass (1985), a novella, was inspired by his receiving two mis-dialled telephone calls from a man seeking the Pinkerton detective agency.
It featured a writer called Quinn who is telephoned by somebody trying to reach a private detective called Paul Auster; Quinn pretends to be Auster and agrees to take on the caller’s case. The story contained such offbeat elements as Quinn shadowing a man who endlessly paces New York’s grid streets; he eventually realises that the man’s route spells out a phrase: THE TOWER OF BABEL.
The book was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, although Auster was patently subverting the whole concept of the detective story. Its power, he averred, derived from its refusal to answer the questions posed by its plot. “It is the inexplicable that seems to contain great meaning … It is impossible to pinpoint, so it reverberates.”
City of Glass was swiftly followed by two more novellas in the same metaphysical vein: Ghosts, in which a detective called Blue is hired by a client called White to investigate a man named Black; and The Locked Room. Some critics were baffled, some repelled, but many raved; Ruth Rendell called Auster “a new Kafka, and more readable than Kafka”. The three novellas were published in a single volume as The New York Trilogy in 1987.
Auster went on to write more than a dozen further novels, usually with a strong element of the bizarre. The Music of Chance (1990) centred on a fireman who spends a year, prompted by an impulse he cannot account for, driving back and forth across the US, and then gets involved in a poker scam to recoup the money he has wasted; in 1993 it became a film starring Mandy Patinkin, with a cameo role for Auster.
Mr Vertigo (1994) was about a nine-year-old beggar who is taught to fly, and tours the States as “Walt the Wonder Boy”. Timbuktu (1999) was the internal monologue of Mr Bones, a hobo’s dog.
Auster rejected Tom Wolfe’s call for fiction to present a realistic portrait of modern society – “I don’t believe that’s the main object of writing novels, and it’s not why people need books” – but hated to have his outlandish, introspective work labelled “cerebral”. “I get called that a lot,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 1996, “and it drives me nuts because I think I write from the gut.”
Paul Benjamin Auster was born on February 3 1947, the son of Sam Auster and his wife Queenie, née Bogat. Like Philip Roth, he was raised in the placid suburbs of Newark, New Jersey.
Paul found his father – a radio engineer who claimed to have worked for Thomas Edison for a day but been sacked for being Jewish, and went on to own a furniture shop – distant and difficult. Only in the 1970s did Paul Auster and his sister learn by chance that when their father was a boy, he had heard his mother shoot his father dead.
Paul was educated at Maplewood High School, and had no interest in reading – “Sport was my life from age five to 15” – until he found himself devouring cratefuls of books that his uncle, the translator Allen Mandelbaum, had asked the Austers to store while he was travelling.
He went on to major in English at Columbia University, NYC, but tired of academia and after taking his MA joined the US Merchant Marine, skivvying on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico for six months.
In 1974 he married Lydia Davis, later to win renown as one of America’s masters of the short story; they scraped a living from translation and tutoring jobs in Paris for some years before returning to New York with nine dollars between them. Their son Daniel was born in 1977.
Between 1974 and 1980 Auster published four volumes of poetry: “Those books had no public life at all. They were only read by other poets.”
He lived precariously by hackwork, and also expended much effort on hapless attempts to sell the rights to a card game he had devised called “Action Baseball”. His years of penury and the collapse of his marriage were later recounted with grim precision in his memoir Hand to Mouth (1997).
As Auster put it, “my father’s death saved my life”: a small legacy gave him the time to attempt a serious prose work, The Invention of Solitude (1982), which won critical acclaim and boosted his confidence.
Appropriately, the book was chiefly a memoir of his father, and it also addressed Auster’s hopes of being a better parent to his own son. In this aspect its poignancy increased with the years: latterly Auster was reported to be estranged from Daniel, who had become a drug addict. In 2022 Daniel died of an overdose while awaiting trial for the manslaughter through negligence of his 10-month-old daughter Ruby.
Auster declared that his own life would have gone off the rails if he had not married Siri Hustvedt in 1981: “She resurrected me from the dead.” They advised each other on their work, although he confessed to feeling “like a plodder next to her”.
After the success of The New York Trilogy, Auster lectured at Princeton from 1986 to 1990. In 1995 he adapted one of his short stories as the film Smoke, a bittersweet comedy directed by Wayne Wang and centred on the various patrons of a Brooklyn tobacconist’s run by a cantankerous Harvey Keitel.
Wang and Auster enjoyed the project so much that they immediately collaborated as directors on a semi-improvised sequel, Blue in the Face, with cameos from Lou Reed and Madonna.
The films were a celebration of smokers’ camaraderie. Auster credited his cigar habit with producing his distinctive husky voice – “like a piece of sandpaper scraping over a dry roof shingle” – and railed against anti-smoking legislation: “Today it’s tobacco, tomorrow sex, and then smiling at strangers will be made illegal.” In his later years ill health reduced him to vaping.
In 2017, in a departure from his usual slim volumes, Auster produced a novel of nearly 900 pages entitled 4-3-2-1. Pursuing his classic theme of how chance events can derail or rehabilitate a life, it posited four alternative existences for Archie Ferguson, a character who bore the customary teasing resemblances to his creator.
Marketed as his magnum opus, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, but reviews were mixed: The Telegraph’s Tim Martin found it overstuffed, “[resembling] the work of a man who has been told he will be shot when he reaches the end of his book.”
Auster’s other works included his Collected Poems (2007), a volume of his correspondence with JM Coetzee (Here and Now, 2013), a biography of Stephen Crane (Burning Boy, 2021), a polemic against lax gun control (Bloodbath Nation, 2023) and his last novel, Baumgartner, about a widowed writer in his seventies, also came out last year.
He wrote and directed the films Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007), to little critical enthusiasm.
Auster wrote in a tiny, monastic room in a brownstone office near his apartment in Brooklyn. Though he found writing “often wrenching, difficult and painful”, he persevered “because it makes you feel you’re living to the limit of your possibilities”.
He admitted to having no faith, apart from a belief that coincidence was life attempting to aspire to the dignity of art.
Paul Auster is survived by Siri Hustvedt and by their daughter, the singer Sophie Auster.
Paul Auster, born February 3 1947, died April 30 2024
