In many ways, writing was, for Auster, an act of faith.
It is a truth widely acknowledged that a first novel is often a thinly-veiled account of a writer’s own life. For Paul Auster, though, the writer and the person were often indistinguishable, enmeshing fact and fiction, reality and make-believe over a course of a long, brilliant career that ended with his death on Tuesday at his home in Brooklyn, New York. Auster was 77. In the Auster counterverse, life was a prototype of fiction in which “All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are”. In books such as The New York Trilogy (1985), In the Country of Last Things (1987), Moon Palace (1989), Leviathan (1992) and Baumgartner (2023), this entanglement assumed an investigation of identity, of love and loss and what remains when old certainties give way.
When he was 14, Auster had had his first encounter with chance. He had been on a hiking tour when a young boy next to him was struck dead by lightning. The memory of it never quite left the writer. In his Man Booker Prize-shortlised 2017 novel 4 3 2 1, in which four different versions of the protagonist’s life play out to different ends, one version has the lead character, Archie Ferguson, die at a summer camp under similar circumstances. Chance and a dexterity with form would become the leitmotif of Auster’s prodigious fiction.
In many ways, writing was, for Auster, an act of faith. In an interview to Paris Review, he spoke of the curiosity that fuelled his fiction: “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… Novels are fictions, of course, and, therefore, they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.”
