In the Country of Last Things, a young woman goes to an unknown land in an attempt to rescue a friend and learns to negotiate the eclectic perils of a dystopia organised on the principle of disappearance. He falls in love with the wonderful Kitty Wu and works for the magnificently maverick Thomas Effing, before travelling into the desert to discover himself and his father, who turns out to be Effing’s long-lost son. In Moon Palace, for instance, Marcus Fogg embarks on a quest that begins in New York.
Many of his early novels, however, are a version of the bildungsroman and follow the struggles of a young person trying to survive and find meaning in adverse, often fantastical circumstances: Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things and Mr Vertigo. Spare yet evocative, it set a template for a kind of self-conscious fictional play that has been the organising principle for a number of his later novels: The Book of Illusions, The Music of Chance, Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark and Oracle Nights. Having set out as a poet and a translator of French poetry, he came to fame first with his abstracted detective fiction, a collection of three novellas collectively published as The New York Trilogy. He’s a metafictional trickster, a handsome, somewhat enigmatic cool dude of the book, and in the latter portion of his career, one half of America’s most prominent literary power couples. Paul Auster has prospered from the romance of being both a New York author and a cultural insider.
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