Austerity

Which work of the writer, poet, essayist, critic, translator, editor, screenwriter, and director Paul Auster, who died of cancer on Wednesday at the age of 77, speaks to us in the spring of 2024? He read so widely in English and French and had so many interests that it is hard to know where to begin discussing the late author and his legacy.

The literary world suddenly feels smaller. But in his later years, Auster sadly fell into one of the traps to which all too many writers who crave attention have been vulnerable, confusing provocation with relevance.

Imagine the following. A dystopian America of the near future falls apart at the seams as people despair of resolving their differences peacefully and embrace violence. Polarization, stoked by right-wing firebrands, has gotten markedly worse for many years, and now an election pitting two candidates who represent disparate, not to say irreconcilable, visions of America and her future has brought things to the tipping point. Regions of the country have broken off and mobilized their military-age populations to quell intervention from self-righteous outsiders who deign to tell others how to live. What long pretended to be a nation united around shared values, civic pride, apple pie, and the flag has devolved into a hellhole where factions that loathe one another wage war in the streets.

The characters at the center are not soldiers, generals, or politicians. They are men and women who have long sought to capture the essence of conflict and warn others about the dangers of unchecked zeal through photos and the written word.

Many who read the above précis will think that it refers to Alex Garland’s campy, hyperbolic, top-grossing film Civil War, whose heroes are reporters. But it is a summary of Auster’s 2008 novel, Man in the Dark.

Garland sees a scenario where journalists make a trek through an America torn by civil conflict and report on the horrors. Some construe his film as a warning about where this fall’s Trump-Biden rematch may lead.

Not so many viewers will know how much Civil War owes to Man in the Dark, in which Auster charted the misadventures of August Brill, a widower who moves in and out of an alternate reality where the tensions of 2000’s Bush/Gore showdown—different from the present, yet all too recognizable—fuel social collapse.

All this might seem an odd way to frame an obit of Paul Auster, an avant-garde writer with a global following, often mentioned in the same breath as his friends Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and the late Russell Banks.

So, granted, this is not how literary obits typically begin. But its subject tried hard to make his name as a bucker of conventional forms, even while falling into the trap that ensnared Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and other talents over the years.

Graced with discipline and intellectual curiosity, Auster tended tragically in the latter part of his career to adopt a partisan stance and consign to the back seat his interest in literary, cultural, philosophical, and metaphysical questions. He badly wanted to matter, and all too often put his talents and interests at the service of an agenda.

Auster wrote letters and editorials taking up, for example, the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther serving a life sentence for the slaying of Philadelphia cop Daniel Faulkner in 1981. More recently, he came out in support of Barack Obama and then joined the chorus of voices denouncing our forty-fifth president as a threat to life on earth as we know it. He epitomized the predictable and, as David Mamet might say, brain-dead type of liberal.

Things was not always so. At the time of his death, Auster had been publishing fiction, memoirs, essays, reviews, poetry, translations, and screenplays for more than fifty years. He lived in Paris and the south of France before moving to New York in 1980, knew Samuel Beckett, and wrote essays on creatives as diverse as the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun and the American metaphysical poet William Bronk, brought together in his 1992 collection The Art of Hunger, whose title alludes to Hamsun’s greatest book.

Auster’s early poetry volumes, Wall Writing and Unearth, are the works of a sensitive writer grounded in the soil of Provence where he wrote obsessively, went hungry, and strived to capture the ineffable sights and sounds of the lush natural world around him.

His postmodernist, noirish, magical-realist novels, from 1985’s City of Glass to 2010’s Sunset Park to 2017’s 4321, gained a wide readership in America and Europe. He received or got onto the shortlist for prestigious international literary prizes, and had his work translated into numerous languages.

Auster’s progression from early struggles with frustration and disappointment and money problems—as detailed in his 1997 memoir, Hand to Mouth—to international success and fame was undeniably impressive. Writers who envy Auster’s standing, and the trajectory of his career, are legion.

Clearly, Auster had much of the public and the literati convinced of his greatness. Read the first few leaves of Picador’s paperback edition of Man in the Dark, where the tenor is typical of the feedback Auster drew over the years from highbrow and middle-brow critics. (John Freeman in the Newark Star-Ledger: “Moody and moving … Auster has crafted a stirring, politically charged portrait of the power of fiction.” Debra Bruno, Chicago Sun-Times: “Auster’s writing is forceful, graceful, and pinpoint precise.” Charles McNair, Paste magazine: “Hope riffles the pages of this beautiful, heartbreaking book.”)

Such plaudits are at odds with the judgment of critic James Wood, who may have done irreparable damage to Auster’s literary standing with a 2009 hit piece in the New Yorker entitled “Shallow Graves.” In this essay, Wood lampooned Auster’s incessant use of the trope of a reclusive Brooklyn writer trying to recover from the loss of a loved one while drinking heavily and engaging in a decades-long project of writing as catharsis.

For all his avant-garde pretensions, Auster, in Wood’s view, failed to perform one of the essential tasks of the writer, namely to invent, to find new ways of construing and describing the world. Not to mention Auster’s reliance on clichés: drinking to drown his sorrows, eyes that had seen too much, et cetera.

Wood criticized Auster for posing as a postmodernist while his technique really amounted to the cheap trick of guiding the reader down a path lit with shopworn and pedestrian prose only to reveal at the end of the journey that a book’s narration has been selective and that some or most of what the reader thought of as the story is an illusion. As Wood put it, “Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.”

In a later New Yorker review-essay about the novelist Jesse Ball, Wood warned his subject to avoid “the fatal shadow of the weightless Paul Auster.”

Wood, and other critics who dismiss Auster in such a hand-waving manner, should ask themselves whether they have ever attempted, let alone pulled off, anything half as ambitious as Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane. This nearly 800-page study of one of America’s canonical authors aspires to take its place among the great literary biographies. It is deeply researched, beautifully written, and will help keep the magic of Crane’s writing potent for generations of readers.

Yet my respect for the achievement that Burning Boy represents does not blind me to the many shortcomings of Auster’s fiction. By far his best-known work is 1985’s City of Glass, the initial volume in the “New York Trilogy” that also includes Ghosts and The Locked Room. Auster himself did not believe there was much rhyme or reason to City of Glass’s prominence within his pantheon, and he had a point.

All three works are about a man searching for himself, or a repressed version thereof. In City of Glass, the detective Quinn stalks and stakes out his Doppelganger. In the slender Ghosts, two metafictional alter egos spy on each other. And then, in The Locked Room, Auster presents us a with a detective and writer manqué who takes on a commission from the grieving Sophie Fanshawe to go looking for her AWOL husband, also an author.

The narrator of The Locked Room, who used to be a writer before selling out, is no stranger to Fanshawe. He spends the early pages of the book recounting their early childhood together and how they tore up lawns and played games on suburban streets. We learn that Fanshawe had no small amount of Tom Sawyer iconoclasm. Once, on the way to a birthday party with the narrator and a boy named Dennis Walden, Fanshawe learned that the poor Dennis had not been able to buy a present for the kid at whose home they were soon to arrive.

Fanshawe insisted that Dennis take the present he was bringing and offer it as if Dennis had brought it all along and Fanshawe could not afford a gift. For this act of spontaneous kindness, Fanshawe gets a rebuke from his mom, who after all spent her own money on the gift. But Fanshawe feels no remorse at all. It just seemed like the thing to do.

This anecdote presents, in just about the tritest way imaginable, the flowering of creative and altruistic instincts in that tender time of life before people become socialized to listen to the wisdom of their elders and meet social expectations. Here is key to understanding Fanshawe’s development as a writer who does his own thing, who plumbs the depths of his subconscious and puts what he finds there out onto the page without regard for success as conventionally defined.

This Fanshawe, of course, is not just a kid who grew up with the narrator, he is the self the narrator should have been but could not grow into under the intense pressures of a hidebound world. Fanshawe is everything the book’s narrator used to be, and would be if he could track down the self that got away.

After a long search, the narrator arrives at the door of the locked room and engages in an argument with the alter ego on the other side. Fanshawe threatens to put a bullet through his own head if the narrator breaks the door down. Here, Auster hits the reader over the head with an analogy so broad as to verge on self-parody. You cannot access the locked room without an act of violence. That part of your psyche is so repressed and buried that you cannot get to it without physical penetration of your skull. Here is what society inflicts on writers, creatives, people who try to do their own thing.

Arriving at the end of The Locked Room, some readers will feel cheated at this Hallmark-card epiphany. You took 200 pages to tell me this? The sad truth is that Auster took 77 years to unload insights that, all too often, do not manifest a much higher level of intellectual or creative insight.

Paul Auster was nothing if not ambitious, and he fostered among many thousands of readers some of the passion that drove him throughout his long and productive career in letters. He galvanized more than his share of young novelists. Writers at all stages can and must learn not only from their own mistakes, but from those of other authors, even ones as determined, well read, and accomplished as the one we have just lost.