On a bright, wintry afternoon in Brooklyn, I share an Austeresque moment with the novelist and screenwriter Paul Auster. Moments after we leave his Park Slope townhouse, we run into a pie-eyed young man.
”You’re Paul Auster.”
”Yes... “
”Can you sign my book?” the fan asks, handing the author a paperback copy of his 1992 novel Leviathan. “You won’t believe this, but I just bought the book.” Inside the cover there’s a receipt to prove it.
”That’s something,” Auster says to me after the stranger leaves us. “You must have paid him.” The coincidence shouldn’t faze this reluctant literary celebrity, a connoisseur of the fateful fluke.
Auster’s 11 novels, three screenplays and three autobiographies have made him the literary godfather of Brooklyn. Clad in a black overcoat and wearing sunglasses that evidently don’t disguise him, the 57-year-old author chats with the mailman; people wave to him but he doesn’t notice. We were going to eat at a crowded corner cafe, but I sense that he’d either get swarmed or gang-gawked, so instead we sit down for lunch at the Inaka Sushi House, a discreet neighbourhood Japanese restaurant.
When Auster finished writing his yet to be published novel, The Brooklyn Follies, last September, he went into a post-partum depression. “Usually I go into a slump after I finish a book - I don’t know what to do,” says Auster, a carnation-red scarf draped loosely around a black sweater as we sip green tea. “I’m suddenly unemployed - there’s this emptiness.”
But it didn’t last long. While his British publisher, Faber Faber, has just reissued the arresting graphic adaptation of his classic novella City of Glass, he is considering a follow-up to his 1998 directorial debut Lulu on the Bridge. He has also just finished a screenplay with French novelist Celine Curiol for Patrice Leconte, the director of L’Homme du Train, who will film his first English-language movie in New York.
As any Austerian knows, this New Jersey-born-and-bred writer and France have had a long love affair. It began when Auster went to Paris for a year abroad as an undergraduate at Columbia University, and the relationship reached its zenith this year when the French government honoured him with the title Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the highest distinction bestowed on a foreign cultural figure - one which he now shares with another more-famous-in-France American, Jerry Lewis.
Auster thinks that Franco-US relations are at their nadir. The French shrugged off the first Bush administration because its mandate was marginal. “Unlike here, the French separate governments from the people,” he says. But the second time around, they’re less forgiving. They just don’t understand why Americans like President Bush. “They’re just puzzled by him - as many of us are.”
While his books are bestsellers abroad and are translated into 30 languages, Auster has yet to win major awards back home. He chalks up the difference to a cultural continental drift. “American literary culture is just different,” he says in a laconic baritone, steeped in decades of cigarillo smoke. “In France, Germany and England, there’s more interest. More press coverage of writers on radio and television. In the States, there are people who are passionate about books, but not as many as there are in France.” He adds that he has no complaints about his US following - his books sell well and remain in print. “And I know how tough it is for really good writers here. It’s disastrous. Even after wonderful reviews.”
Asked for examples of underappreciated US authors, he cites friend and Australian expat Peter Carey. “His last book, My Life as a Fake, is one of the most exhilarating books I’ve read in a long time, and it bombed.” His other example is his wife, Siri Hustvedt. He calls her last novel, What I Loved, a masterpiece. But, as he explains, the international bestseller got lost in the shuffle at home as the US invaded Iraq.
He and Hustvedt have lived in the same brownstone for 11 years. “I couldn’t afford it now,” he jokes. When I visited the three-story townhouse earlier that day, he gave me an oral tour: the top floor was for the old people, middle floor for the young - namely their 17-year-old daughter Sophie - and the top of the stairwell for the dog, he said. Off the living room there was a shimmering, immaculate Christmas tree with fasten-on candles - a Scandinavian tradition that most Americans would call a fire hazard. “That’s Siri,” Auster said. “Norway by way of Minnesota.” He later explains that a bucket of water is kept nearby.
After Auster orders the pork bento box - a dabbler’s delight that comes with dumplings, vegetable and rice, I ask him how his renowned literary marriage came to pass. About 20 years ago, they met at a poetry recital at New York’s 92nd Street Y, he says with slight embarrassment. Hustvedt showed up with an older, married professor, but once he gleaned that she wasn’t taken, he paid her serious attention. “And I’ve been paying her serious attention ever since,” he adds. And, apparently, the favour is returned. He reads his writing to her, and she critiques it. “She’s a very astute reader. I don’t think I’ve ever not taken her advice.” While his wife always writes at home, Auster puts in about seven hours at a nearby office with a refrigerator.
We discuss the house’s third tenant, Sophie, who is on the cusp of fame as a singer: that day German Vogue came knocking for a shoot. Auster’s older child, Daniel, by his first wife, author Lydia Davis, is a more sensitive topic. In 1998, Auster’s son pleaded guilty to swiping $3,000 off the body of a dead drug dealer at a nightclub. Hustvedt’s What I Loved, published in 2002, was seen by some as a roman a clef in which the female protagonist’s troubled stepson is entangled in the grisly murder of a club kid.
When asked about his son, he is polite but firm. “I absolutely don’t want to talk about it.” But, in his view, is domestic life fair game in fiction? After all, Auster’s most recent published novel, Oracle Night, and Hustvedt’s What I Loved both mention a troubled young son with drug problems; Oracle is told by a narrator named Trause - Auster jumbled up; Loved is told by a Minnesotan academic of Norwegian ancestry. Are these parlour tricks that beg for extra-literary interpretation?
Auster insists that incidents from his own life rarely show up in any of his fiction except for a few situations in the novella, The Locked Room. And the appearance of Paul Auster in City of Glass was not the Paul Auster sitting in front of me, he says, but someone else. Someone he didn’t like. “I was making fun of myself.”
When he’s not being shaken down about his family life, his open body language belongs to someone who likes to gab. Often his right hand sits on the table next to us while the left gesticulates as he talks about the latest translation of one of his favourite books, Don Quixote, or Ficciones by Borges. Despite a shared love of detectives and puzzles, Auster isn’t a big fan of the Argentine maestro’s writing. He rubs his fingers together and cringes: “There’s something desiccated about it.”
Like Borges, Auster is a poet and translator turned story-writer, but this inveterate dabbler didn’t stop with fiction. After writing seven novels, he went into films. The films he wrote for director Wayne Wang - Smoke and its spin-off Blue in the Face - were cult favourites and, in the late 1990s, Auster took the plunge by writing and directing his own film, Lulu on the Bridge, starring Harvey Keitel and Mira Sorvino.
A striking and flawed film that portrays the magical last moments of a jazz musician, Lulu was fraught with obstacles. It was supposed to be directed by Wim Wenders, but the Wings of Desire auteur backed out. The Screen Actors Guild demanded that his backers set aside $500,000 in escrow for foreign residuals and, though they settled for a lower price, the cost nearly pulled the plug on the soundtrack budget. His literary friend Salman Rushdie was going to play Mr Singh - a menacing, know-it-all kidnapper who abducts the protagonist - but the teamsters on the set felt that a man with a fatwa on his head endangered their safety. “The so-called he-men of the movie business said that we were trying to kill them,” Auster recalls. The pressure of that conflict finally got to him. “I just went into a corner and cried,” he says, “and I hadn’t cried like that since I was a kid.” Eventually Mr Singh became Dr Van Horn, played by Willem Dafoe.
Ultimately, the financiers shot down all the offers to distribute Lulu across the US and the film never made it to the large screen. The experience taught Auster some valuable lessons about the film business. “You just have to keep your movie as inexpensive as possible,” he says. “Less money gives you freedom, and the more freedom you have, the better you can control your results.”
As Auster re-enters the movie business, his literature has already achieved one crucial measure of popularity: along with William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, he is reportedly the most shoplifted novelist in New York. “We all just happen to be at the beginning of the alphabet,” downplays Auster. But there’s more to that than mere chance.
Inaka Sushi House
Brooklyn, New York
1 x katsu pork bento box
1 x chicken teriyaki bento box
2 x green tea
Total: $33.14
