Lit Hub’s initial commentary..
Paul Auster, beloved American writer, died yesterday at 77, at his home in Brooklyn. Auster rose to prominence in the mid 1980s with his widely beloved “New York Trilogy,” beginning with City of Glass, which was rejected 17 times before finally being published in 1985. (Though it should be said that Auster’s 1982 memoir, The Invention of Solitude, was reviewed in the New York Times by no less a writer than WS Merwin).
Auster, also a poet and translator from French, brought a distinctly Gallic flair to both his writing and his life, employing a deftly beautiful postmodern mixture of the lyrical and the hardboiled, borrowing as effortlessly from American genre as he did from continental formalism.
Auster, while continuing to publish novels at a prolific pace—The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), Mr. Vertigo (1994)—began writing for film in the 1990s, turning his own short story, “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,” into Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang. Like much of his fiction, Smoke is a sly but deeply felt ode to Auster’s beloved adopted home of Brooklyn, where moved in 1980 and lived with his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, until his death.
Auster continued to publish fiction and nonfiction throughout his career, collecting literary accolades for novels like The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies, and, notably, 2017’s ambitious, loosely autobiographical 4321.
Aside from the immense value of his work on its own, Auster’s daring departure from the lineage of mid-century Jewish American novelists like Saul Bellow and fellow Jerseyite Philip Roth paved the way for genre-curious American experimenters like Jonathan Lethem and Colson Whitehead. Auster stands now alongside Haruki Murakami and WG Sebald as a master literary shapeshifter (employing the intellectual playfulness of the former, and possessed of the emotional depth of the latter).
Auster is survived by his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, and is predeceased by his son Daniel Auster (by the writer Lydia Davis, Auster’s first wife) and granddaughter Ruby.
