The writer who explored chance and destiny
In Paul Auster’s books, the world is a precarious place. Narrators are unreliable, reality and illusion blur, lives are governed by chance events. The prolific Brooklyn author, who wrote novels, poetry collections, memoirs, nonfiction works, and screenplays, toyed with form—blending postmodernism and detective fiction, the highbrow and the hard-boiled—and with selfreference. In City of Glass (1985), a mystery novelist gets pulled into a labyrinthine case after he’s called by someone seeking a detective named Paul Auster. His screenplay for Smoke (1995), set in a Brooklyn tobacco shop, features a writer named Paul who escapes death when he’s pulled from the path of an oncoming truck. “We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence,” Auster, who died of lung cancer, said in 1995. “People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.”
Born in Newark, N.J., Auster grew up in “a middle-class Jewish home,” said the Los Angeles Times. Two incidents shaped his youth. His uncle, a translator, gave him some boxes of books, sparking “an interest in writing, literature, and poetry.” And while he was at summer camp at age 14, a campmate standing right next to him was killed by lightning, a tragedy whose randomness “changed my whole view of the world,” he later said. After attending Columbia, he set out to be a writer, but “struggled for years,” said the Associated Press. He translated French literature and worked as a switchboard operator and on an oil tanker. City of Glass was turned down by 17 publishers; finally published when he was 38, it proved his breakthrough.
He’d write 17 more novels, often “with a strong element of the bizarre,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Writing daily, he always did the first draft in fountain pen—“you dig the words into the page,” he said. Tragedy struck in 2022. His troubled son Daniel died of an overdose shortly after being charged with manslaughter in the death of his infant daughter, who’d ingested heroin and fentanyl. But Auster maintained his steady output, publishing a final novel, Baumgartner, whose protagonist confronts failing health. “Anything can happen to us at any moment,” the character says. “Everyone knows that—and if they don’t, well, they haven’t been paying attention.”