A lightning strike at summer camp shaped Paul Auster's obsession with chance
At 14, Paul Auster was at camp when lightning killed a boy standing inches away from him. He called it the seminal experience of his life and said he thought about it every day. Chance, coincidence and the lives we might have lived became the engine of his novels.
Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947, the son of a landlord in an unhappy marriage that ended while he was finishing high school. As a boy he shone at baseball, playing the infield. After degrees in English and comparative literature at Columbia, he moved to Paris in 1970 and scraped a living partly by translating French writing, work he kept up after returning home in 1974 with versions of Mallarmé and Joubert.
His first book was a memoir, The Invention of Solitude, in 1982. Fame came with The New York Trilogy in 1987, three linked novellas that borrow the trappings of detective fiction without really caring who did it. Critics read them as postmodern puzzles about identity and language; Auster insisted they grew straight out of his memoir. The Music of Chance in 1990 put randomness at the centre, and the decade that followed drew him toward cinema. His screenplay for Smoke, made with Wayne Wang, won the Independent Spirit Award for best first screenplay, and he directed Lulu on the Bridge himself.
Back at the desk from 2002, he produced nine novels, two memoirs, an 800-page life of Stephen Crane and Bloodbath Nation, a pamphlet on American gun violence. His late novel 4 3 2 1, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, follows four alternative versions of one life, a fitting summit for a writer haunted by what-ifs.
Opinion on him split sharply. Michael Dirda praised his limpid, confessional style, while James Wood mocked his dialogue yet conceded he was probably America's best-known postmodern novelist. He was especially loved in Europe, winning the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Prince of Asturias Award, and his books reached more than 40 languages. He lived in Brooklyn with the novelist Siri Hustvedt and died there of lung cancer in April 2024, aged 77.
Source: Paul Auster
