A quick memory of Paul Auster: novelist, screenwriter, and… game designer?

Sad news this morning with the death of Paul Auster at 77. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I discovered his books in my late teens and early 20s. I read The Music of Chance at school after I’d spotted it at the library and, of all things, found the cover intriguing. Later, at university, I had a lecturer who was a serious Auster fan and was foolish enough to lend me his signed copies of Leviathan and Moon Palace. I say foolish – I treated those books like holy objects while I had them in my house.

For a few years I read everything he wrote, going backwards mainly. I loved his strangely serious playfulness – postmodernism was big at the time and this was his response, I think. I remember thinking it was incredibly freeing the way he would just drop a character with his name into one novel, and then another. I read his autobiographical stuff, which read like fiction, and his fiction which had these long stretches that felt like real life, and had probably come from real life.

Two books stick with me though: Moon Palace, which I think is the classic Auster, compact and roving, curious and distinctly miserable in spots, wildly inventive yet moving, somehow, within tight rules imposed by the author prior to writing. And Hand to Mouth, a memoir that I remember as being largely concerned with being really skint in your 20s.

Hand to Mouth is fascinating because it follows Auster as he tries to make a living at various things, like translation, office jobs, and that sort of thing. And then all of a sudden he designs a card game and tries to sell it. The game’s called Action Baseball, and I think he originally made it up to play with standard playing cards, but the book contains the entire rules and – I couldn’t make sense of this at the time – a middle section containing designs for all the cards you need to play.

I never played the game because I didn’t want to destroy the book, but there’s a lot of stuff in Hand to Mouth about Auster’s attempt to sell it, going to Toy Fairs and experimenting with the then-cutting edge tech of colour Xerox. At one point there’s a plan to market the game with cereal boxes, but the whole “muddled saga”, as he puts it, unravels eventually when he approaches a game broker to sell the game on his behalf. She says sports games don’t sell. “That did it for me,” writes Auster. “With the woman’s blunt pronouncement still ringing in my ears, I hung up the phone, put the cards away, and stopped thinking about them forever.”

As did I, until today, when I read of Auster’s death and spent 10 minutes hunting for Hand to Mouth in my house, finding much else I didn’t realise I would be happy to find along the way. But that’s Auster, and that’s why it makes sense he made a game at least once: his big theme, through all his books, is chance. The coin that could land on one face, and could land on another. And the big things that come from such tiny moments. In another world that game broker sold Action Baseball, and Paul Auster never wrote novels. Thank you for the novels.