Paul Auster reckons that the last US presidential election was stolen, and since then he's had the feeling the country has been living in a shadow world - which is why he's hoping for an Obama landslide today, he tells Louise East
WRITERS, AT LEAST really successful ones, are a little like turn-of-the-century society debutantes. At a certain point in their careers, they are obliged to embark on a grand tour of Europe, taking in all the great cities, plus a few out-of-the-way ones, to show originality and character.
Paul Auster reels off the cities he has been to in the last month, as though trying to recall in which order the planets are aligned: "then Vienna, Stuttgart, Barcelona for a few very intense days, London today and tomorrow I go to Milan". He does not, of course, refer to it as a grand tour. He calls it "the long march".
This book tour, though, is unlike any other in his 20-year career as a writer. From day to day, everything changes; the country, the hotel room and the colour of the journalist's hair. Yet everywhere, the questions remain the same. What will happen in the US election? Will Obama win? Are we entering a depression? "Everyone's having the same conversation everywhere. The whole world has just pulled together in its misery," says Auster, wryly noting the hotel room allotted him in London is the sinister-sounding room 101.
In a way, Auster is an unlikely successor to America's itinerant commentator, Mark Twain. Until his most recent book, Man in the Dark, politics had no place in Auster's work. Instead, his 12 novels, including The New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, Leviathanand The Brooklyn Follies, niggle away at such existential posers as the fluidity of identity and the logic and logistics of chance.
But throughout his career, Auster has written vividly about America, its culture and its recent past and in particular about the New York borough of Brooklyn where he and his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt, have lived for many years. In addition, the uncanny world Auster conjures up - one in which a character by the name of Quinn might get a call from one called Paul Auster or a man who goes to sleep in his bed wakes up in a hole - makes him peculiarly well-qualified to comment on these Through the Looking-Glasstimes.
"To be away from New York during this economic collapse is extremely strange," Auster muses. "It's a complete overhaul of the thinking on how to run capitalism. We've had this propaganda from the American right for the last 40 years that government intervention is bad and suddenly, overnight, laissez-faire policies are done and governments are stepping in to save the free-market economy. It's all so ironic, isn't it?" He chuckles with a kind of Tom Waits-ian wheeze and raises a trademark triangular eyebrow. In person, he is more easy-going and funny than the intense dark-eyed photo on his book-jacket suggests, and he is rarely far from that wheezy giggle.
Only the question of whether Barack Obama will win the US presidency today sobers him up.
"I have two very big fears. Number one, that there'll be more white people than one imagines who will not vote for Obama, simply because he's black, and the other thing is cheating. Rigged voting machines, denying people the right to vote - all kinds of underhand things that are invisible to us. I think he needs to have a landslide victory for neither of these problems to surface."
Auster has only recently come to terms with the result of the election in 2000, not by condoning or accepting George Bush's presidency, but by tackling it in his work. Man in the Darkdescribes a man, Owen Brick, waking to discover he is in a parallel America, one in which the response to the 2000 election was civil war, there's no war in Iraq and 9/11 never happened.
As this is Auster's world, Brick quickly discovers that he is, in fact, a character in the late night, insomniac story-telling of an ageing book critic called August Brill, who is himself lost in a place of bewilderment, his wife dead, his granddaughter's boyfriend slaughtered in Iraq. Brick is dispatched to kill Brill in a metafictional quest with echoes of At Swim-Two-Birds.
"I saw an old friend of mine, [director] John Boorman, two nights ago and he said, 'you know, it made me think of Flann O'Brien'. But of course that book is one of the great comic novels of the 20th century, and I wouldn't describe this as a comedy in any sense," Auster says.
"To me, the result of the 2000 election was an outrage. The fact is, Gore won. He got more votes. He won in Florida and everybody knows it but through legal and political manoeuvrings, the Republicans took it from him, and he let it happen.
"Ever since, I've had this feeling that the reality we've been given is not the one we chose. We're living in a shadow world." A more personal grief also shaped a book shot through with rage at the grim dice-roll of war. In summer 2006, Israeli novelist David Grossman gave a press conference calling for an end to his country's war with Lebanon. Two days later, his 20-year-old son Uri, a sergeant in the Israeli army, was shot and killed. Man in the Darkis dedicated to the whole Grossman family.
"That was the crucial element which pulled the novel together for me. David is a very close friend of mine - he's one of the people I admire most in the world. I was hit so hard by Uri's death, I understood that this book, which had been gathering force in my head, would be centred around the death of a young man in a war."
Usually a methodical worker, who writes longhand in the morning and types up the day's work in the afternoon, Auster was astonished at the speed with which Man in the Darkwas completed. "I wrote the book in three-and-a-half months. It was the first time in my life as a writer when an entire book was present in my head and came pouring out as if I was taking dictation. I wonder why, but I have no answer. The only thing I kept thinking was of that rather beautiful comment by the American painter Philip Guston who said, 'Years and years of struggle for a few moments of grace'. That's how I felt when I was writing this book."
BORN IN 1947 in Newark, an unfashionable town in the unfashionable borough of New Jersey, Paul Auster wrote from an early age. Funding himself with literary translations (he's an avid Francophile) and an impressive array of obscure low-paid jobs, success evaded him until he switched from poetry to prose.
"My life was falling to pieces and I stopped writing altogether and when I started writing again, it was prose." Initially published without much fanfare, it was 1987's bleak but compelling New York Trilogywhich first earned him recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. In it, Auster mapped out the concerns that have preoccupied him ever since, most notably, a near-obsessional interest in the possibilities and implications of chance.
Auster is now associated with coincidence as indelibly as Updike is with infidelity or JG Ballard with gated communities (in 2001, Auster even edited a collection of stranger-than-fiction accounts called True Tales of American Life), yet he remains curiously unimpressed by the idea.
"I don't know if coincidence would be a word I would use; the unforeseen, perhaps, the accidental. Chance, or whatever you want to call it, is part of the mechanics of reality . . . Just think about your own birth. If you ask your parents how they met, so often it's just a flukey thing, yet you're the product of that marriage."
A prolific writer, Auster consistently produces literary hits (2004's The Brooklyn Folliesstill haunts the paperback-bestseller charts) but he is not without his critics. Some erstwhile fans suggest an air of repetition has infested Auster's formerly audacious thinking; others disparage Auster as a purveyor of a hokey form of existentialism lite.
"Certain people have been grinding axes against me for 20 years," Auster says philosophically. Normally, he makes it his business not to read reviews of his work, but opening the New York Timesover breakfast recently, he chanced on a review of Man in the Dark. "There was a line at the very end which made me laugh. It said, 'Paul Auster does not believe in traditional fictional values', which sounds like something you'd accuse a candidate of in a political campaign. I thought, well, he's probably right. It bothers him and other people find it thrilling."
AUSTER HAS ALSO had to put up with a rather ghoulish fascination with his home life, most particularly after his son from his first marriage, to writer Lydia Davis, was caught up in a lurid club-land murder in 1998 (elements of the case appeared, in fictional form, in both Hustvedt's novel, What I Lovedand Auster's Oracle Night).
"You know," Auster says calmly. "I don't read any of this stuff. I don't have a computer. I'm never on the internet. The fact is I don't live my life looking at myself from the outside. I'm inside my own head and I have the same inner dialogue going on with myself that I had when I was six years old." He and Hustvedt lead, he says, "a quiet life" in the same Brooklyn Heights brownstone they have occupied for more than 25 years. Auster writes in a small studio a short walk away; Hustvedt from an office in the basement. Both operate as each other's first readers: "I don't think there's a single instance when I haven't taken her advice to heart. She's a very sharp person, very sensitive." Aside from the "long march" of publicity, the only thing to lure Auster away from a life he clearly loves is film-making, in which he has had a somewhat patchy side-career. After his successful collaborations with Wayne Wang on Smoke(1995) and Blue in the Face(1995), 1998's Lulu on the Bridge(sections of which were filmed in Dublin) went straight to video.
Most recently, Auster decamped to Portugal for several weeks to shoot The Inner Life of Martin Frostwith actors David Thewlis, Irène Jacob and Auster's daughter, Sophie Auster, a 20-year-old prodigy who has already recorded a solo album of chansons, some penned by her father.
"I find film endlessly interesting. There was a time, when I was 19 or 20, when I thought I might want to become a director. The reason I didn't was because I was so shy, I couldn't talk if there were more than two people in the room.
"People use the word 'fate' or 'destiny' as though everything's been mapped out in advance. I certainly don't feel that at all. Anything could happen at any moment. There is no master plan. We're all billiard balls, careening around the table. At times we bump into each other, at others we glide right up to the cushion."
• Man in the Darkis published by Faber and Faber, £14.99
