Paul Auster: A rare cultural icon who engaged and entertained

He was a lifelong advocate of left-leaning politics and a trenchant critic of former US President Donald Trump. Yet, Auster was also the rare cultural icon who engaged and entertained, even as he explored the big questions of life, and worked very much from within the guard rails of his personal moral universe.

Auster brought to contemporary fiction what Alfred Hitchcock did to modern cinema—a unique blend of gravitas and melodrama that gave their followers an exquisite high, like drinking a classy Manhattan, the bittersweet cocktail named after one of Auster’s most beloved parts of New York.

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As a long-time admirer of Auster’s work, especially of his incredible work ethic (his painstaking process of writing each book by hand, then typing it up, abjuring computers all his life), it’s hard for me to pick any one of this prolific writer’s many books to talk about in this column. But two among his rich oeuvre of fiction, non-fiction and memoirs stand out—City of Glass(1985), the first volume of his New York trilogy, which I first read as a teenager, and Hand to Mouth(1997), a memoir that bore the subtitle, A Chronicle of Early Failure, which I discovered in the throes of an extended mid-life crisis.

City of Glass is one of Auster’s most iconic works, a breathtaking work of staggering genius, to riff off the title of Dave Eggers’ celebrated novel. It’s one of those books, no matter at what age you read it, it leaves your head and heart spinning. Before I come to it, though, it’s sobering to begin with Hand to Mouth, a study of the universal struggles that aspiring, and published, writers must grapple with throughout their lives.

Hand to Mouth, appearing at the height of Auster’s fame, is a blow-by-blow account of what it felt like for a young man to drop out of Columbia University, move to France, and make a living as a translator, reviewer and occasional writer, with his wife and infant son to support, in the early 1970s. It’s a hard-hitting portrait of “the writer in the attic" trope, shorn of all the faux glamorous appeal that has been accruing on this figure over the years.

Of course, in hindsight, Auster was probably insulated by his white privilege, an American passport that could take him back home anytime he wished for a semblance of social security. But Hand to Mouth is a testimony to his staying power, as well as that of his first wife, the writer and translator Lydia Davis. It’s a chronicle of rejection from a series of publishers, of being forced to adopt habits of frugality that left very little leeway and observing how the wretched of the earth—figures like Maria, a single mother of three, and Tony, a homeless guy—make their way through life. It’s necessary reading for anyone who wants to be a writer or laments that they have failed at it—a cautionary tale as well as a motivational pep talk to never give up.

If Hand to Mouth holds up a grim but redeeming mirror to the life of a writer, City of Glasss hows the author as a trickster spirit, spreading stardust of mischief and confusion like Tinker Bell of Peter Pan. Inspired by the book-within-book maze-like structure of Don Quixote, City of Glass plays on the fiction of authorship. Just as Cervantes claimed to have synthesised his epic story from material available from “the archives of la Mancha" and the accounts left behind by the fictitious Moorish historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, Auster, too, creates an elaborate artifice in his book. The unnamed “author" of City of Glass claims to have reconstructed the narrative from the jottings in a red notebook left behind by Daniel Quinn, a writer of pulpy detective fiction, who, coincidentally, shares his initials with Don Quixote.

Even more curiously, “Paul Auster", the writer mistakenly assumed to be a private detective by an unknown caller, who sets off the action of the story, makes a cameo appearance in Quinn’s narrative, along with his son Daniel (also the name of the real Paul Auster’s son with Lydia Davis), and his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. Reading City of Glassis like stepping inside a hall of mirrors, dizzyingly exciting at times, and frustrating at others, but most of all, utterly disorienting.

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By introducing multiple layers of authorship—as though Daniel Quinn, the unnamed narrator, and the Paul Auster character were parts of his real and shadow selves—Auster radically destabilises the notion of a fixed self. Long before internet and social media became spaces to live in and generate personas on, Auster threw the reader of City of Glass into the deep end of the fictional pool, where everything seems to assume the urgency of truth as well as the deception of a practical joke.

Re-reading this book in 2024 is like tracing the origins of the metaverse and the range of possibilities it has unveiled, including the insidious realm of deep fakes, identity theft, elaborate hoaxes, and the unstable ground upon which we stand. As Quinn puts it, “nothing was real except chance".

Indeed, in his desire to obliterate his authorial identity, Quinn has only ever written his crime novels as “William Wilson". Like Elena Ferrante, he is a disembodied hand that created stories, a writer who had never met his agent. His perception of others is captured by the thoughts he harbours before he meets the character of “Paul Auster". “Auster was no more than a name to him, a husk without content," Quinn muses. “To be Auster meant being a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts."

Of course, every word you read in City of Glass comes out of the pen of Paul Auster, the man who died recently, beloved of millions of readers around the world, with razor-sharp handsome looks of a model. But the novel is also a legacy from a writer who explored the landscape of interiority, the substance of who we truly are, and what it means to invent and re-invent the self through words.

Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in Delhi.