Auster

What started as an idle curiosity has begun to spiral into something more. As I sifted through some routine midweek paperwork, I happened to spot a stack of Paul Auster novels on my desk. Each book came complete with a handwritten order slip inscribed with all the necessary catalogue details; all signs suggested that they were new library acquisitions requested by a resident PhD student.

The paperbacks were all recent editions and featured gorgeously generic stock photographs of dark urban landscapes and American iconography. But I was drawn to the name: Auster. I'd heard him recommended by friends, and I'd heard of an artistic connection to Beckett, but I was also drawn to the name because it resembled the word 'austere'. I don't know exactly why, but as I'm a minimalist at heart I saw this as a good omen. I didn't think twice about picking the books up.

It never fails to surprise me to think of the role chance plays in our lives. And while we can consider seemingly random events as inherently meaningless, I'm also astonished by our insistence on constructing a reason or an underlying logic to call events into account. It was pure chance that led me to Auster, but the arbitrary act of opening the first of the paperbacks immediately created a new path for me - to new interests and very old ones. And just talking about chance in this way brings us into Auster territory. There is no real and true reason why I picked up any of his novels, but the act of doing so has taken me somewhere else. To such an extent, in fact, that I can't seem to put any of them down.

Paul Auster's novels seem to dwell upon elements of chance that, unbeknownst to us, hold a key, overriding influence on our day-to-day activities. Auster's work often features middle-class protagonists, usually writers, struggling to adjust to a sudden, seemingly random, chaotic event. With their lives suddenly upturned, they struggle to make sense of their surroundings by questioning who they once were, and who they are becoming.

Auster's artistic interests may border on the esoteric and the philosophical, but his style is firmly rooted in the structure of a forward-driving narrative - and it's this key element that makes his work so readable. I can already see some of Samuel Beckett's aesthetic concerns being distilled by Auster in the form of the American mystery or detective story. The unreliability of language to account for the world is one of the central ideas of the New York Trilogy: whether it's the straightforward breakdown of communication, the confusion between fiction and reality, or utopian ideals of a perfectly expressed language. But many of the mysteries, masquerading as airport paperback fare, are ultimately structured around questions of the protagonist's identity. Auster's novels are like existential thrillers.

There's also something to be said about the influence of other writers on Auster's work. The New York Trilogy certainly owes something to Kafka's sense of the absurd; and stories like Dostoyevsky's The Double, a mysterious doppelgänger that expresses ulterior aspects of its central character, also seems to hold a grip on Auster's prose. But it's the way these ideas are fused and combined in new settings and new contexts that makes them feel fresh off the page.

There are times when Auster appears a little ostentatious, perhaps a little over-dramatic - especially regarding the subject of writing. But I think he can be forgiven. After all, it's usually his protagonists that exhibit the symptoms, and we can't expect to hold him responsible for them, can we? Besides, given the self-conscious nature of Auster's characters and his stories in general, to condemn him for this might be besides the point.

So far I've devoured The New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, and The Music of Chance. I opened Leviathan this morning and things are already off to an interesting start.