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“Life becomes death,” wrote Paul Auster in the opening paragraph of his first book of prose, The Invention of Solitude (1982), “and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.”
Auster, who has died aged 77 of complications from lung cancer, was a writer who combined popular appeal with ludic experimentation in three decades of fiction, from his breakthrough The New York Trilogy (1987) to his last novel, Baumgartner (2023).
He once said that a novel of his life would be called The Ups and Downs and Long, Chequered Career of PA, but there were more ups than downs. Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 3 1947 to a middle-class Jewish family. A formative incident in his childhood (“something I’ve never got over”) took place aged 14, when he was caught in an electrical storm; a boy just inches away was struck by lightning and killed. It was an incident he would return to in memoir and fiction.
Auster decided to become a writer, he told the Paris Review in 2003, “about a year after I realised that I wasn’t going to be a major-league baseball player”. In 1971, a year after graduating from Columbia University, he and his then girlfriend, Lydia Davis, now known for her short stories, moved to Paris where they made a living as translators — of catalogues and scripts as well as poems and fiction — while working on their own writing.
They returned to New York and married in 1974, and Auster made increasingly desperate attempts to earn money — including trying to sell a card game about baseball he invented — as recorded in his memoir Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997).
In 1982 he married another writer, the novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt, and in 1987 The New York Trilogy was published. It comprised three novellas, the first of which (City of Glass) in its opening words exemplified Auster’s approach, combining storytelling with strangeness. “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.”
The stories in the trilogy — one featuring a character named Paul Auster — were “exquisitely bleak literary games” in John Updike’s words (“Kafka goes gumshoe”, as Auster’s editor put it), taking a postmodern, kitchen-sink approach to fiction: throwing everything in, messing with the reader’s perceptions, blending reality and fiction.
Auster was making a virtue from a necessity, he later said: “So many strange things have happened in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain I know what reality is any more.”
There continued to be something of the “utter randomness” of that childhood lightning strike in the novels that followed: the Beckettian absurdism of The Music of Chance (1990), where two men build a meaningless wall; Leviathan (1992), about a man blowing himself up with a homemade bomb.
After a successful period writing film scripts including Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995), in later work Auster’s appetite for both page-turning realism and nouveau roman experimentalism was increasingly split into separate works, each satisfying the competing impulses. Novels such as The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and Invisible (2009) were straight storytelling, taking a refreshing walk in the outside world, while in the reflexive Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), a man named Mr Blank was stuck in a room reading a manuscript featuring Auster characters from earlier books.
As the number of characters scribbling in notebooks within his novels can attest, Auster was deeply interested in the process of writing itself. He said he was “intimidated” by computer keyboards and preferred to write by hand. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. It’s a physical experience.”
Auster was part of a network of bookish royalty: friends with Peter Carey, Don DeLillo and JM Coetzee, a stalwart of the New York literary scene. In many ways he became a celebrity, as striking in person as on the page, his face (the adjectives “saturnine” or “handsome” were variously used) looming out from the back — sometimes the front — covers of his books. The playfulness in his fiction sometimes extended further: in Leviathan, his narrator Peter Aaron married Iris Vegan, the narrator of Hustvedt’s 1992 novel The Blindfold.
His work was popular in Europe — in 2007 he was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture — though he claimed to regard this success with suspicion, fearing it marked him out as pretentious or “an alien”. “It is irritating,” he told the Financial Times in 2017, “because all my books have been about America.”
Although he turned towards non-fiction late in his career — Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021), and Bloodbath Nation (2023), a polemic about guns in the US — Auster never lost faith in fiction. “A novel”, he said, “is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.”
In 2022, Auster’s son with Davis, Daniel, died following a drug overdose, not long after his baby daughter was found dead by his side.
In March 2023, Hustvedt announced on social media that Auster had been diagnosed with cancer three months previously. He is survived by Hustvedt and their daughter Sophie.
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