Thoughts on Auster

(after reading his novel, Leviathan)

Wafers-

I rarely talk about myself on this blog, because its stated purpose is to study the decline of the American Empire. However, I wanted to share the following short essay with you, which I wrote a few weeks ago. I hope you’ll indulge me this one time.

What can Paul Auster do that I can’t?

-Get inside of complex people emotionally. My fictional characters (well, not all of them) would seem to be cardboard figures, by comparison.

-Provide tons of specific detail, so that people or situations become immediate, and alive. I tend to be lazy in this regard, at least in my fictional work.

-Grab the reader by the throat from the get-go. Presentation of a mystery, or a problem to be solved, that becomes the thread of the book. Thank God, I can do some of this.

Of course, my fiction is different from my monographs or essays, which are superior to my fiction, in my opinion. My nonfiction does have a thread that pulls the reader through the books, that holds them together. They have always been attempts to solve cultural or psychological puzzles. I’m proud of this work, beginning with the Reenchantment book. When I recently received my copy of Weisheit in the mail, I thought: this is an elegant book, both physically and intellectually.

Oddly enough, I’m also proud of my fiction, which I think is more than just merely interesting. Or at least, I’m content with it. But here’s the difference between myself and Auster, in this regard: I am a decent writer of fiction; he is a great one. My work is fun to read, often absorbing, and so on, whereas Paul’s work touches on the great existential themes, especially the one of What exactly are we doing on this earth? This may be unfair to myself, but whereas my novels are enjoyable (but probably mostly forgettable), Paul’s novels are enjoyable in a different, even dark, sort of way, and would seem to be unforgettable. They are “magnetic.” They have a depth, a power, way beyond anything my own novels have. Or so it would seem.

The truth: I don’t have it in me to write fiction as gripping as Auster’s. For the most part, I don’t really feel bad about it. He was born to be Paul, and I was born to be me. In the same way, perhaps, that he was destined to have a good marriage, and I wasn’t. The reply to that is basically, Well, that’s what was in the cards. Which is somehow acceptable. All things are not possible for all men, and all of us need to appreciate who and what we are.

Paul died two years ago this April, at age 77, from lung cancer. He was a smoker, perhaps a heavy one. But he loved life, and said as much at one point. Why didn’t he force himself to quit smoking? 77 is too young to be gone.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about death, especially in connection with awareness practice. I sit in my apartment in Mexico City, I look through the sliding glass doors onto the balcony, and I see my bougainvillea plant, now resplendent in bright red-purple flowers (which have returned from the dead, after being absent for two or three years), and I think: I may live to 101, but after that point, I’ll never see these flowers again. I’ll never see anything again. And it hurts to realize this. Like Paul, I want life to go on forever, even with my bad back, my difficulty in walking. Mindfulness practice, awareness, reminds me of my mortality.

I think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, “Dirge Without Music,” in which she debunks the stuff we tell ourselves in an attempt to cheat death: e.g., that our children will constitute our continuity, or that our work will supposedly survive us, and therefore that we won’t “really” be dead. What hogwash, she says. Bodily death is the end of the story, period. It is the reality of this, and the finality of it, that she can’t accept; and neither can I. “I am not resigned,” she says; neither am I. I can accept not being the great writer that Auster was. I can accept being a decent writer, no more than that. But I can’t accept the inevitability of dying, of disappearing from the earth. Fuck all I can do about it, as luck would have it.

©Morris Berman, 2026