Like most novelists, Paul Auster is loath to discuss his work in progress. He waves off inquiries with a dismissive “I’d rather not”, in his gravelly Brooklyn drawl. But there is one person who can provoke the otherwise retiring writer to spill his secret in the most public way. That person is his President, George W. Bush.
At a recent anti-Bush fundraiser, Auster lined up with a Who’s Who of contemporary American letters — Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Cunningham, Susan Sontag, Jhumpa Lahiri, even the transplanted Salman Rushdie — to read the unpublished opening pages of what will be his tenth novel. Titled The Brooklyn Follies, it began: “I was looking for a great place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn.”
Only near-fury could propel the author into such an act of recklessness. In conversation at the well-appointed Brooklyn townhouse he shares with his novelist-wife Siri Hustvedt, he confides that this year’s US election has whipped him up into a lather. “I am burning with passion about this whole campaign,” he growls. “For me, it feels almost like a matter of life and death for Americans that we get Bush out of office.” This is Auster, the poet, translator, novelist, essayist, editor, screenwriter, radio personality and film director, in a new incarnation: intellectual “engagé”.
To prove the point, he slides a CD into the impressive hi-fi console in his parlour. From the speakers comes the rasping voice of his local French café owner belting out a song Auster wrote on the outbreak of the Iraq war. (It can be downloaded at www.topplebush.com.) Called the King George Blues, its harsh melody and biting lyrics make it sound like a number from The Threepenny Opera sung by a male Lotte Lenya.
The fat men are in charge
The thin men take the barge
To Hell
To Hell
To Hell.
“It’s almost like an agitprop song from the Thirties,” he explains. After reciting the long list of issues for which he despises the Bush Administration — tax cuts, job losses, the environment — he cuts to the chase: the war. “This new idea of the pre-emptive war is something so terrifying to me,” he says. “Obviously, over the last 100 years America has been involved in underhanded dealings all over the world. But in the big picture, our stance has always been: ‘We are not going to attack unless provoked.’ By saying we are going after anybody we like, we are turning ourselves into ugly bullies and I do not want to be part of that country.”
A francophile existentialist with a touch of native Gothic, Auster has triumphed through force of will to become one of America’s most acclaimed writers — and one of its most prolific. For years, he struggled as a starving artist, working as a merchant seaman on an Esso oil tanker and then as a translator in Paris. In his memoir of that time, Hand to Mouth, he recalls “a constant, grinding, almost suffocating lack of money that poisoned my soul and kept me in a state of never-ending panic”. He was 39 when his first novel — The New York Trilogy — was published.
Now 57, he has produced eight more novels, three memoirs, five books of poetry, and the screenplays for three films, one of which he also directed. Every day, after reading The New York Times over a pot of tea, he walks a few minutes to his studio and spends the day writing in long-hand before typing up his draft on his old Olympia typewriter. He estimates that he writes two pages, or 500 words, a day, but then needs another day or two for revisions. “You have to be dogged to be a novelist,” he says. “You can’t just do it when you want to.”
Auster’s plots are sometimes criticised for their contrived use of chance, which leaves the reader wanting for “the suspension of disbelief”. Characters’ lives lurch from one coincidence to another. But chance — and its ultimate corollary, mortality — is Auster’s grand existentialist theme. The point of departure of his latest book, Oracle Night, for instance, is the parable in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon about Flitcraft, a successful businessman who walks out on his family and begins a new life one lunchtime after almost being hit by a falling beam. “The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives, and those lives can be taken from us at any moment — for no reason at all,” Auster writes in a good summation of his philosophy.
Auster swears his life has been governed by the unexpected ever since the boy next to him was struck dead by lightning during an expedition in the woods when he was 14 — an event that marked him for life. “It’s mostly one strange thing after another,” he says. “It just keeps going. I do not know what to make of it. Now at this age, I just consider it the mechanism of reality.” To test his theory, he launched the National Story Project on America’ s public radio, inviting listeners to record uncanny tales from their own lives. Some 4,000 responded, ranging from priests to a Vietnam veteran who claimed his company had roasted a stolen Vietnamese baby and eaten it around the campfire. The best 179 he collected into a sparkling anthology titled True Tales of American Life. “I am happy to report that everyone has gone through surprising and wrenching experiences,” he says.
One of the most surprising and wrenching experiences of Auster’s life must be his son’s involvement in the notorious nightlife man-slaughter case retold in the Macaulay Culkin film Party Monster. In 1998, Daniel Auster, then 20, Paul’s son by his first wife Lydia Davis, pleaded guilty to stealing $3,000 from a drug dealer named Andre “Angel” Melendez. Melendez had been killed by club-kid Michael Alig, who chopped up the body — after pouring drain cleaner down the throat — and dumped it into the river. Daniel was never implicated in the killing, but reportedly admitted that he was in the flat at the time.
It is tantalising to speculate how the affair affected the two-novelist household. In Oracle Night, Auster creates a character named Trause — an anagram — who is also a writer and has a “drug-addled” son who assaults the narrator’s wife. In What I Loved, Hustvedt tells an even more detailed tale about an artist’s son who falls under the spell of a hypnotic figure known as the She-Monster, who kills a club kid named Rafael Hernandez and is rumoured to have dumped him into the river. Hustvedt has admitted she modelled the artist figure on her husband.
But Auster gets irritated when asked about the possible similarities between the book and his son’s life. “I have to tell you, it’s not autobiographical,” he says. “All the facts are completely different from what happened in the real world and she made a conscious effort to do that.” Although he has previously refused to answer questions about his son, he now says: “He is doing really very well, extremely well. I am very proud of him. In the vaguest terms, he is working; he is supporting himself; and living in an apartment. He has been in this job for quite a while now.”
