Writer known as the "dean of American postmodernists"
Paul Auster, who has died aged 77, was a prolific novelist and memoirist whose work – with its fractured narratives, unreliable narrators and deconstructions of identity – could seem "primed for analysis" by students of literary theory, said The New York Times. A leading figure in the New York literary scene, he was described as the "dean of American postmodernists", and the "most meta of American meta-fictional writers".
But his books were still highly readable, said The Times, and there was something dazzling, and dizzying, about the way he oscillated "between highbrow and lowbrow". As one reviewer observed: "If the avant-garde gestures bore you, a gunshot will soon ring out, or some unfortunate will have his brains bashed in with a baseball bat."
Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947. His father, Samuel, was a remote and distant figure; his mother, Queenie, realised on her honeymoon that she regretted marrying Samuel. Only years later did Paul discover that when his father was six, he'd heard his mother shoot his father dead. Paul found refuge from the strains at home in his passions: baseball and reading. The latter was fuelled by an uncle going abroad, and leaving boxes full of books at their house. But the formative event of his childhood took place at summer camp, when he was 14. He and some other children were in the woods when a storm broke out. As they crawled under a wire fence to get back, lightning struck and killed the boy just ahead of him. It left him with the sense that random events can alter everything in an instant, that we face "endless forking paths".
"We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence," he told The New York Times in 1995. "Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is."
He studied literature at Columbia University, and then moved with his soon-to-be first wife, the writer Lydia Davis, to Paris, where he scraped a living by translating French literature, and started to publish his own work in literary journals. They returned to New York in the mid-1970s with just nine dollars to their name; their son Daniel was born in 1977. Auster published a few volumes of poetry, which he said had "no public life at all". He tried, and failed, to make money from a baseball card game he'd devised; and his marriage collapsed. His father's death saved his life, he said: a small legacy enabled him to write his first prose book, "The Invention of Solitude". It examined his relationship with his father, and in it he expressed the hope that he'd be a better father to his own son.
This came to seem yet more poignant, said The Telegraph, when it emerged, years later, that he was estranged from Daniel, who'd become a drug addict. Daniel died of an overdose in 2022, awaiting trial for manslaughter over the death of his baby daughter, who had ingested heroin and fentanyl in his care. Auster said he would have gone off the rails himself, had it not been for his second wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, with whom he had a daughter, Sophie.
His first novel, "City of Glass", a postmodern take on a detective story featuring a character called Paul Auster, was rejected by 17 publishers, but ultimately became the first volume in his hugely acclaimed New York Trilogy. He wrote nearly 40 books in all, drafting them in longhand, then typing them up on a typewriter; and in the 1990s, he branched out into screenplays, including "Smoke", set in his own neighbourhood of Brooklyn and starring Harvey Keitel. Although he sold well in the US, he was even more popular in Europe; in France, he had "rock star" status. His brooding, saturnine looks may have helped in that, though friends said that these belied his natural warmth, wit and generosity.