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We talk more about culture under capitalism. Not a particularly new subject, but it's refreshing to discuss it with someone who doesn't sigh. Auster, I'm certain, has never once considered throwing his hands up. There's some Horatio Alger in him, and I decide, briefly, he could have my vote in a congressional election, should the occasion present itself. What else could you want in a writer?

He offers the standard author's objection to talking about his work -- "the text speaks for itself" -- but I decide he can give the text some time off.

"You don't necessarily go for a strict realism," I say, thinking of the deliberateness that often steers his characters from adventure to adventure in a way I've never been steered. "Not to say the books aren't realistic. But the characters are so clearheaded -- even when they're not clearheaded people. They always know what they're after in a way that a 'realist' might not have his or her characters be. They don't have moments where they're just sort of staring at the microwave or dragging their sleeve through the coffee while they linger in some feeling or other."

"I think a lot of them are completely lost," he says, sitting a little straighter. "But, well, I'm interested in presenting cosmologies, a way of understanding, figuring things out through the stories. And yet always keeping it down to the ground at the same time."

Auster patiently suffers through a few more minutes of book talk. He describes his fascination with narrators and authorial voice, an interest he recalls having even as a child rummaging through books in his grandfather's attic. The conversation wanders from writing into something more casual. Still, I'm aware of something like ontological urgency in what we say; it is understood that one ought discuss the things that matter, no less.

We talk a while longer, a good 15 minutes after I stop the tape recorder. By the end we're joking and lounging, Auster draped gracefully over his chair like a sheet. Eventually I pay for our Cokes and we say our good-byes. I leave with the heady enthusiasm of someone who's just had soda with one of the world's good people. And if the couple with the laptop at the edge of the lounge somehow implicate me in an existential conspiracy they've cooked up -- if my Coke with Paul Auster proves the doorway to a crisis of identity, chance and narrative -- I decide, in the true Austerian spirit, that I'm game.
salon.com | July 23, 1999

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