His latest novel, 4 3 2 1 (Henry Holt), might well be his sprawling American opus. America may be less vocal in its reverence, but Auster is nevertheless considered one the most hallowed living writers, perhaps only less glorified because he still seems to be at the top of his game. No question, he’s immensely influential in Paris, which has always championed our more transgressive writers. Coetzee to artist Sophie Calle-and even a second career as a four-time feature filmmaker.Īnother pervasive notion is that Paul Auster is more celebrated in Europe-particularly France, where he spent a few years after college-than the United States. Over the years, Auster’s vast inventiveness has also led to a number of fascinating collaborations-from author J.M. Auster’s books seem to contain detectives without a crime, or crimes with detectives, missing persons who are right in front of you, or characters that-to steal a line from his ingenious 1992 novel Leviathan-are as mysterious, seductive, and unknowable as “a hole in the universe.” Auster is often described as a master gamesman, a sort of literary chess wizard, but make no mistake, his cleverness does not stick a foot in front of the beauty and momentum of his prose. Or to recast that last sentence as a positive, Auster offers an entirely new direction on what fiction and writing can do, new possibilities (often, a mise en abyme of fictions inside fictions inside fictions or terrific Geryon-like creations fused from fiction, autobiography, and historical record). In the course of a literary career spanning more than 30 books, the 70-year-old novelist has become America’s foremost experimenter in the boundaries and limits of fiction, authorship, form, and the very notion that the traditional narrative arcs are sound bridges to transcendence. For the uninitiated, it comes from the first pages of Auster’s 1985 meta-masterpiece City of Glass in his New York Trilogy, where a mistaken late-night phone call asking for the author/detective leads the protagonist into a maze of shifting identities and herrings that are all the same shade of red.

When I called Paul Auster up at his house to ask if he’d be willing to be featured in Interview, I was tempted to open with this dialogue.

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