RIP Paul Auster

There was something about Paul Auster. In the Country of Last Things, a dysoptian novel published in 1987, was the first of his books I read. I’d devoured Kerouac and Vonnegut’s idealism, but distinctly remember being in the back of the van our band was touring in, pootling around South Devon, feeling distracted, then drawn in, then swallowed up by what felt like exceptional, fresh writing.

Trying to play drums and being in a band had defined me for the last few years at that point in my life. It maybe fanciful and/or apocryphal to say so now, but I’m sure it was at that point, reading In the Country of Last Things, in 1989 or 1990, that I knew I’d take literature more seriously.

Anyway, I read a fair bit, but in that van journey, travelling from one battered venue to another, was hooked. When I got back from whatever gigs we were playing I went back to a secondhand bookshop just off Marylebone High Street where I’d bought my Faber edition of In the Country of Last Things, and picked up the Faber edition New York Trilogy. Even stranger; even more readable; even better. Auster was – just like that – my new literary hero, and his writing somehow familiar, pretty much always scintillating and – in many ways – instructive.

After reading those first two books, I pretty much kept up with Auster. For me, his run from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s was exceptional, one novel after another, with themes of identity, profound coincidences and isolation. All very European feeling, but somehow with a beat and rhythm which was shinier, and somehow more American.

Auster’s last published novel, Baumgartner, is in my ridiculously excessive ‘to read’ pile. I was one of those who was less than wowed with 2017’s ambitious door-stopper, 4 3 2 1 and wondered if that was that, novel-wise, especially after family tragedies.

The publication of Baumgartner addressed that fear, but only very temporarily.

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The Guardian’s obituary…