Paul Auster: a magician who assembled mosaics of meaning and memory

When Paul Auster was 14, he saw a young boy struck by lightning. This was at a summer camp in upstate New York, in July 1961. The boys were on a hike in the woods. A storm broke – “the summer storm to end all summer storms”, as Auster described it in his 1995 essay Why Write? “verywhere we went, we were met by more lightning.” At last, someone spotted a meadow. “o get to it, we had to crawl under a barbed-wire fence.

The same year, The Invention of Solitude, a memoir of Auster’s recently deceased father, was published to critical admiration but no great sales. “And then, suddenly, it happens there is death,” Auster writes, in the first paragraph of that book. “Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.” The lightning strike, again.

Auster’s habitual method, in memoir and in fiction, was mosaic. Between the tiles of significant memory, what? Often, the answer was padding, or cliche.“surpassingly beautiful”. Others were not so charitable. “Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction,” James Wood wrote in 2009, “the prose is never one of them”.Paul Auster in Oviedo, Spain in 2006.

That Auster’s first published novel was a pseudonymous thriller is significant. All his life, he was a hermit crab, occupying the discarded shells of popular fiction – yet another place to hide. His novels are full of detectives, actual and metaphorical; they tend not to find out very much. The New York Trilogy parodies the detective story by sending its murder mystery plots down rabbitholes of epistemological ambiguity.

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