Metaphysics A' La Mode - Paul Auster

Harry Ritchie (Monday July 25 1988) in The Times

When The New York Trilogy came out in Britain last year, reviewers eagerly endorsed American acclaim for Paul Auster. Highbrow pundits hailed a breakthrough in contemporary fiction and grasped for new
categoriespost new wave, post post modernistand the Trilogy leapt into the best seller lists.

This spectacular success has been followed, inevitably, by some literary bitching, to the effect that the rave reviews were earned not by the writing but the trendy dustjacket, or the glamorous title,
or the author's good looks. The attempted dismissals have failed, though, for in those three stories of men obsessively trying to solve unsolvable mysteries Auster, proved himself to be an original, haunting and compulsive novelist.

Auster has kept a commendably healthy distance from the reactions to The New York Trilogy and now to his new novel, In The Country Of Last Things, another nightmarishly convincing work, which portrays life
among the rubbish and rubble of a devastated city. In London for the British publication of the book, Auster is much more concerned about how he, his wife Siri and their one-year-old daughter Sophie are
coping with jet lag, than his current literary status.

"If I mean to be honest and live rigorously inside myself, I have to say, `If I had the courage to ignore criticisms before I have to find the courage to ignore praise'.'' He smiles ruefully at hearing himself deliver this high-minded declaration: "In any case,'' he adds, "I've been through too many years of going it alone.''

Auster has been going it alone as a writer since his early twenties, when he left his native New Jersey to work abroad an oil tanker, before making his way to Paris in 1971. He spent four years there,
working on his poetry and often barely managing a livelihood as a translator. His commitment to his writing brought him closest to destitution when, for the free accommodation and tiny salary, he took
a "job'' as the caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France.

"The day came when my girlfriend and I had absolutely nothing left. All we could find to eat was a pre-made pie-crust and a bag of onions, so we made a kind of onion pie. It tasted extraordinary, the
best food we'd ever hadexcept perhaps not quite hot enough, so we decided to heat it up some more. Of course, when we took the pie out of the oven again it had burnt up. We had a couple of hours of
despair, but, then, completely out of the blue, a photographer who occasionally stayed with us turned up at the door, gave us his hotel expenses and treated us to a meal.''

Having survived the demise of the onion pie, Auster returned to New York, where he continued to scrape a living while he published four books of poetry but remained the kind of poet known only by other
poets.

The appearance in 1982 of the two autobiographical essays which comprise The Invention of Solitude brought him a little more attention, but he still struggled to find a publisher for City of
Glass, the first of the three short novels that would form The New York Trilogy. Auster collected 17 rejection slips before this book was accepted by a small press in Los Angeles.

The astonishing success of those three "metaphysical thrillers'' ensured that the only difficulty with publishing In the Country of Last Things would be in choosing which of the plaudits for the
trilogy would adorn the dustjacket.

Like the trilogy, the novel presents a protagonist driven on a quest at the cost of discarding all the comfort and camouflage of civilisation. In this case the narrator, Anna Blume, records her
hopeless search for her brother in a city where society has almost entirely disintegrated.

The bleakness of the worlds he creates and his sparse, meticulous style have prompted comparisons with Beckett, but Auster's fiction has an immediate and rounded emotional reality which makes it
eminently accessible. Nevertheless, he still finds that some critics have misunderstood his new work and categorized it as a description of life after an apocalypse.

"If anything, the book is about now,'' maintains Auster. "There are references to things that have actually happenedwhen Anna sees people being killed for food, for example, that comes from the siege of
Leningrad. Even the garbage system in the book is loosely based on the one in present-day Cairo. My working sub-title was Anna Blume Walks Through The Twentieth Century.''

Beyond that Auster refuses to explain or analyze the novel. "If I knew what I was writing I wouldn't do it.''

In the Country of Last Things first imposed itself on Auster 18 years ago when he first heard the voice of his character Anna Blume. "It was almost as though I was writing through the medium of her self,''
he reflects. "I was troubled by the idea of the narrator being a woman, but it was her voice, it had to be her.

"There were many times when I couldn't hear her and I had to set the book aside. Then, about five years ago, I wrote 30 or 40 pages, but I still didn't know what to make of it.

"But Siri pushed me to write it, she said, `You have to keep on doing this book for me.' It's her book. And it's my special book, the book that feels closest to me.''

Many thanks to Leonard Wright of News International Newspapers Ltd