At first glance, at least, it seems like most of the obituaries have got it wrong.
Paul Auster, who died of lung cancer at 77 this week, was not a one-book-wonder. He wrote over 37 novels, memoirs and screenplays. And yet, it appears that he is still defined by The New York Trilogy. In that anthology of novellas (City of Glass, the first part, was his debut, published in 1985), Auster engages in a Rashomon-like plot where the writer, the subjects and his themes bleed into each other and the final work is a mutation and a meditation — on authorship, stories and an answer for that most mundane and profound of questions.
Whodunnit?
As a result of The New York Trilogy’s success, Auster has been called a post-modernist and post-structuralist writer — the Jacques Lacan or Jacques Derrida of the American novel. His use of unreliable narrators and throwback detectives and/or broken men with pasts that haunt him has led obit writers to describe him as “European” in style and sensibility. If they are indeed right, they are only half right.
Perhaps it’s a question of location. For the readers of Auster who live outside the West, he is a window into America — not a throwback to Europe. Not an America of success and wealth and aspiration, but a more real place of loss, uncertainty and fractured masculinity. Unlike other Jewish writers of remarkable talent — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and even Woody Allen — Auster’s starting point was not identity. It was loss, even deprivation.
In some of his best works — which are, unfortunately, not the most celebrated — Auster is a magical realist. Take Timbuktu (1999), one of the most underrated meditations on death in literature. The narrator of this slim volume is a dog whose human companion, a homeless man, has just died. “Timbuktu” is a stand-in for the afterlife, and the dog seems wiser than the divine semantic opposite. Then there’s Mr Vertigo (1994), the Huckleberry Finn-like tale of an illiterate beggar boy who is taken away from home to learn to fly. Literally levitate. His ignorance is an asset, increasing his chances for success with less weighing him down. Perhaps the tale of deceit, ambition, murder and revenge is an allegory of the American dream. Likely, it’s not so trite as that. Either way, it is a fantastic tale — not least because the magic is not a function of grace, but of burdens and work and history.
Unlike many of his contemporaries (he was born in 1947, so the list goes from John Updike to Salman Rushdie to Jhumpa Lahiri), there is no straight line between character, identity and a larger politics in Auster’s works. In Sunset Park (2010), for example, the 28-year-old protagonist takes photographs of discarded things — traces of home in abandoned houses, where people were forcefully evicted after the 2008 crash. His life, too, is in recession — a wasted youth sees him squatting with another man and two women. The book is full of political incorrectness: The narrator is from an upper middle-class background, there are age differences that are prudishly frowned upon between consenting sexual partners. But Auster does what an artist is supposed to — tell the story of a time through the story of people.
In Leviathan (1992), the writer turns detective to explore what would cause a man to blow himself up. It’s a moral whodunnit. It is courageous, if only in retrospect, as an act of trying to answer questions about suicide, “terrorism” and loneliness without either pathologising the act and actor medically or excluding them from our moral universe as “monstrous”.
There are many other works by Auster that deserve to be read and remembered. The Brooklyn Follies (2005) stands out for me. It features once again, two broken men, uncle and nephew, brought together by circumstance. In it, Auster is as ever the master technician of the form. And he uses his talents to great effect to write about the most cliche and most enduring thing of all — the redemptive power of unlikely love.
By the time Auster gets to 4 3 2 1 (2017), it looks like he’s just showing off. The book — a story of one man told from four different perspectives — is The New York Trilogy redux. It just shows that practice can make you so much more perfect.
What, then, is the “theme” that runs through Auster’s work? What is it that so many obituaries of a writer celebrated from England to France to America to India have missed? How does he answer the question he always asks — literally, morally, fantastically and magically? A hint may well lie in one of his slimmest volumes, so filled with the (well-earned) self-indulgence of a writer at the peak of his powers that he cannot help but reveal himself.
In Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), we meet Mr Blank — a man who has lost everything. Meaning, identity, memory. He discovers the small things in furniture and photographs and eventually meets people who blame him for their fate. These people are echoes of characters we have met in earlier works, and Mr Blank is their creator and their villain. Like a selfish God, the writer makes and destroys fate to slay his own demons. He makes us cry and laugh, his words can haunt us from beyond the grave. His work is an amoral end in itself.
Whodunnit? The writer dunnit.
aakash.joshi@expressindia.com
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