Author Sees Disorder as Cradle of Character

Paul Auster seems like such a stable, engaging man, not at all the type to be afflicted by the stuff of bad dreams.

The 40-year-old novelist, who teaches creative writing at Princeton University, talks of his happy marriage. He has a 9-year-old son, Daniel, whom he clearly adores. He’s eagerly awaiting the birth of his second child just weeks from now. And he recently bought a small apartment for his family in Brooklyn.

He is also the kind of person who practices small niceties. “Would you like me to pour your tea?” he asked a reporter one recent spring afternoon in a Hollywood Hills cafe.

So how did someone as apparently easygoing as Auster manage to conjure up “In the Country of Last Things” (Viking: $15.95), an unrelievedly grim novel set in a city where half the population is homeless and starving. Where death is such a welcome alternative to life that “assassination clubs,” “euthanasia clinics,” and suicide cults abound. Where corpses litter the streets and are routinely stripped by scavengers or relatives, a practice that compels Anna Blume, the pragmatic young narrator, to remark: “If the gold from your husband’s tooth can feed you for a month, who is to say you are wrong to pull it out?”

All on the Dark Side

Possibly the only thing missing from this bleak vision of civilization is a gang of motorcycle mutants a la “Mad Max.” “The funny thing is,” said Auster, by way of explaining how he came to write this apocalyptic tale, “all the books I do are on the dark side. The older I get, the less I question the sources of stories. They just occur. That’s why it’s difficult to talk about the book. Things just impose themselves on you.”

But then the author of the highly regarded “New York Trilogy,” a series of “unconventional” psychological detective thrillers, is definitely taken with the idea that disorder betrays character. He reads a lot of books on history and Third World politics, and his conversation is loaded with allusions to the gruesome and bizarre. “There’s a book I like very much,” he said, sipping lemonade as he talked. “It’s called ‘Hunger.’ It’s about a young writer working around Oslo who is starving to death.”

Referring to an “extraordinary” book on the Angolan revolution he recently read, he recalled how after the Portuguese fled the capital of Luanda, there was one movie theater and one movie--the X-rated “Emmanuel”--in town. “In the middle of this chaos,” Auster said, “the projectionist showed the movie 24 hours a day for free. And every time it came to a particularly sexy spot, he would stop the film, freeze frame it, and everyone would comment, cheer, or hiss.”

Pausing, he laughed and shook his head. “No one could make this up. But these things happen all the time. All the time.”

A World Coming Apart

Clearly, Auster’s novel stems in part from his conviction that the world as we know it is coming apart. He is appalled by the problem of the homeless. “It’s hard to close your eyes to it. And it’s not a very long step toward imagining yourself in that position. Anyone with any sensitivity is going to think about these things.”

And he is distressed that few of us seem to be paying much attention. “I don’t think we really find out who we are until we lose things. In America, we’re so surrounded by things I don’t think we think about it very much.”

In fact, he said of his novel: “One of the subtitles I had in mind--a working phrase--was, Anna Blume walks through the 20th Century. A lot of the events in this book are simply things that have happened. This is not a futuristic novel.”

Take, for example, the “horrifying scene” where Anna is lured to a human slaughterhouse.

“That’s true,” Auster said. “There were human slaughterhouses. It happened in Leningrad during the Second World War, when the Nazis hemmed in the city for 2 1/2 years.”

Auster concedes that some readers might find his novel “depressing,” with its portrayal of a world in such irremedial decay. But whether it is or not is really beside the point.

“For all the grimness of the book, I think there is some buoyancy to it,” he said. “I think most of the characters are people who are fighting to preserve their humanity under these terrible conditions. Because that’s really what the book is: how do you remain human when the world is falling apart?

“I suppose if people read the book in an honest way, maybe they would think about their own relationship to things around them--the political realities, the social realities, wars, ideologies, economic chaos--things we’ve lived with for so long that we hardly notice them anymore.”

‘It’s a Short Book’

Auster perhaps feels so passionately about this novel for another reason. Begun in 1970, “In the Country of Last Things” took him an astonishing 15 years to write--a fact he is somewhat embarrassed about. “I know. I know,” he said, smiling. “It’s a short book.”

Never mind that “City of Glass,” his first novel, was described as “remarkable, “powerful,” “poetic” and “wonderfully imaginative.” Or that he’s being touted in literary circles as a major new talent. He readily confesses that he has a “lot of trouble” writing, that he writes with “excruciating slowness” and that he tends to “feel low” much of the time when he’s working.

For Auster, the problem was the main character. The story is told by Anna, a “squeamish little rich” girl who has stumbled into this self-destructing city in search of her brother, William, a journalist who has disappeared while on assignment there. Faced with streets “filled with dead bodies,” Anna concentrates on staying alive. She works as an “object hunter,” collecting broken and discarded things to sell to “resurrection agents.” She moves in with Isabel, a kind-hearted scavenger, and her cracked husband, Ferdinand (Ferdinand builds tiny ships in bottles and catches mice to pass the time), who eventually tries to rape her. And she recounts the horror of it all in a long letter to a friend “back home”: “By now,” she writes, “it is the one thing that matters to me: to have my say at last, to get it all down on these pages before it is too late.”

“It was all a matter of hearing her voice,” explained Auster. “There were times when I just couldn’t get it. I gave up on it numerous times. Years would go by and I’d put it away. Ten years it just sat in the drawer.

“When the idea first occurred to me--of course, these things don’t happen in any logical way--it was a woman. At one point I even tried to do it through the voice of a man. It didn’t work. Somehow the voice of a woman implies more truth to me. If I couldn’t speak through her voice the book would be nothing.”

Eventually, Auster showed some pages of the manuscript to his wife, Siri. “She’s a very astute literary critic,” he said. “Someone whose judgment I completely trust.” She told him that he had to finish the novel, if not for himself, for her. “I think if it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have done it.”

Auster wanted to be a writer since he first started writing poems and short stories as a child growing up in New Jersey. And money has never been very important to him.

A 1970 graduate of Columbia University with a degree in literature, he’s had a lot of “odd” jobs. A merchant seaman on an Esso oil tanker. A census taker in Harlem. And for four years in the early ‘70s, he lived a “hand-to-mouth existence” in France, working variously as a tutor, translator, telephone operator for the Paris bureau of The New York Times and caretaker of a farmhouse in Provence.

“I was kind of in the middle of all that ‘60s business,” Auster recalled of his decision to leave America. “I think my disgust for the country was very great. I worked very hard on my writing when I was in France. I kind of made myself into a writer there. So it was a very good thing to have done.”

In the meantime, Auster is enjoying giving readings and interviews for “In the Country of Last Things,” something that is new to him. “It’s so interesting talking to people,” he said with enthusiasm.

If he seems somewhat moved by the positive reception to his latest book, it’s no wonder. Though his body of work is impressive--in addition to four novels, he’s written four books of poetry, a memoir and a collection of essays--he’s had a tough time getting published.

“City of Glass,” the first volume of “The New York Trilogy,” was by his own account rejected “everywhere. Seventeen places turned it down. No one understood it. It wouldn’t sell. It was too confusing.”

Eventually published by Sun and Moon Press, “City of Glass” was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel of 1986. It’s been optioned by actor Peter Riegert for a screenplay. And, in April, it was issued in paperback by Penguin and was named a selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club.

‘Very Strange’

But Auster said, “I can’t expect to have lots and lots of readers. The work is too demanding. It’s not conventional.”

In fact, he continued, referring to “City of Glass”: “There was somebody the other day. Very strange. Some man from Palm Springs, Calif., bought the book and was so outraged by it he sent it back with a hysterical letter.”

And? “He said this is the worst book he had read in 50 years. The rantings of an insane mind, a lunatic. And he sent a letter to the book club, the publisher and five or six different places.

“It’s somehow pleasing to irritate people,” said the mild-mannered writer, smiling. “I suppose if they can respond so passionately, then something must be happening.”