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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
The author of the recent novel "Timbuktu" and the screenplays for "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face" discusses cynicism, sentimentality, Brooklyn and the strange things he creates.
Jul 23, 1999 | In "Timbuktu," Paul Auster's new novel, the setting moves from Brooklyn, where I used to live, to northern Virginia, where I used to live. This is a coincidence, and coincidence is no coincidence in an Auster novel. In an Auster novel, characters meet characters named Paul Auster, detectives spy on writers who are already spying back and chance encounters govern the universe. I am prepared to believe this afternoon's interview may yield anything.
I first read Auster when I was living in Brooklyn. It was "City of Glass," the first novel in his "New York Trilogy," and my ex and I took turns reading chapters aloud. We both found that the other read at once too fast and too slow: Something funny happened on the pages, a tide rushing you to the next sentence and an undertow sweeping you back to reconsider the previous one.
After the "Trilogy," I got to work on the rest of his oeuvre. The 52-year-old has written more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as a considerable body of poetry and the screenplays for the films "Lulu on the Bridge," which he directed, and "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face," His most recent novel, "Timbuktu," came out this past May. "Timbuktu" is the famously dog-narrated tale of a hobo poet and his canine companion, Mr. Bones. The novel wanders -- sometimes more than a lot -- with its itinerant protagonists, who trek down to Baltimore for the poet's last day on Earth. Auster keeps busy.
The appeal of Auster's work is that of watching a good detective movie that knows it's a detective movie: self-conscious plots that cook. Narrative structures meander like their occasionally transient protagonists. Or they explode laterally like their New York City setting. Or they fold in on their genre novel conventions: a private eye's search for his private "I" contracting upon itself in a climax markedly beyond genre. It is not inappropriate to use the term Austerian in those moments when paranoia, fate and a man with a mysterious briefcase collide.
I get to the Stanford Court Hotel in San Francisco early and poke around. The cheery lobby gives way unceremoniously to a dim, faux-old hotel bar. It's California riffing on oak-and-brass New York, and not to unappealing effect. What the place lacks in smoke and moody pomp it makes up for in comfortable chairs. I sit, then get up, then go to the bathroom, then pace around the lobby.
I get bored in the lobby and peek back in the bar section. A woman has recently taken a seat at a small table where a man is staring down a laptop. They exchange stiff greetings and bend over the computer screen. "Is it accurate?" I hear her ask. "Yes."
They glance at me and I duck behind a corner. That's when I imagine I've wandered into the meta-maze of a Paul Auster novel: As the laptop couple whisper, then nod in my direction, then lean back to the keyboard for a burst of typing, it becomes perfectly clear that they have my life on their computer screen: "He waits for his interview with writer Paul Auster. He wonders how the writer will respond to his questions: Will Auster turn that intense stare of his on me? Colin wonders if he's missed his mark with the writer altogether, if Auster will prove slicker than the smart but ultimately Brooklyn guy he hoped for."
I forget about the computer and its whispering operators. It's five minutes until I call Auster; to my surprise, I'm not nervous. His intense, somehow intimidating reach into Borgesian labyrinths of mirrored identity gets eclipsed by an even more intense compassion. He does his characters gently, does not condescend. They are beyond sympathy -- one simply admits them and invests in their spirit. When Glass, in "City of Glass," assumes the persona of Paul Auster, detective, one cares only that he find what he's looking for. Even the confused and misled are sympathetic, as with occasionally homeless Willy Christmas of "Timbuktu," who wanders America, sleeping on grates and rambling to Mr. Bones about Spandex. I think Auster will be nice.
At 3:10 p.m. I use the courtesy phone. Auster says he'll be right down. "How will I know you?" he asks. "You'll know me." "OK," he says and we hang up. I straighten the yellow carnation pinned to my sweater.
A minute later he steps into the lobby and looks around. He spots the flower, smiles gently. He's tall and handsome and not at all the Mr. Intense of his book jackets. He's wearing black jeans and classic Converse tennis shoes. We find a table out of the way.
The chatting comes easy. Auster is relaxed and salt of the earth; he's people. We agree we don't want to eat and we don't want to have cocktails. We have to do something. We shrug and get $4 Cokes.
He's in town for a couple of readings, promoting "Timbuktu," and we start talking about places. He admits to having lived in Berkeley briefly.
"I must say I enjoyed the time very much, but I felt that the tug of New York was too strong," he says. "I haven't really thought about living here again, but every now and again, I pass through and I always enjoy it. It's a beautiful city, and it doesn't feel like any other place."
