By Suzie Mackenzie

 A funny thing happened the day I went to interview Paul Auster in New York. Well, I say funny, but that's perhaps too strong a word. And yet later, looking back, it did take on a kind of humour; an Austerian humour. Something, anyway, that I think would make Auster laugh. It was a beautiful day and, since I had a few hours to kill before making my way over to his home in Brooklyn, I walked downtown to Union Square and into the five-storey Barnes and Noble bookshop, a bibliophiles' heaven. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, certainly not for books by Auster.

Still, as I browsed, some impulse made me go up to the fourth floor, to where works of fiction are alphabetically housed, and inch my way along the shelves to the letter A. There, between Austen and Balzac, between Atwood and Ballard, at the point, in other words, where you would expect to find Auster... Not a thing. A gap. For a moment, I have to say, this shook me. But then, as I pondered the meaning of this absence, it began to take on the aspect of some fantastic joke. Of course, it was right. That the man who has made his literary identity out of the search for his own identity. The man who has turned the problematic question 'Who am I?' into the solution, 'I am the man who is asking that question.' That he would not be in the place where you would expect to find him. What could be more apt? It was then that I saw the sign. A small card, and on it these enigmatic words: 'If you are looking for Paul Auster, ask downstairs.' This was even better. A trail. Because wasn't this the whole purpose of my trip to New York, to seek and to find Auster. Wasn't I, in some small measure, playing the detective, the seeker after truth; not unlike Auster's own metaphysical detective Quinn in his wonderful The New York Trilogy. I ran, almost jumped, down the four escalators.

'I am looking for Paul Auster,' I shouted at the girl behind the counter. 'Which one?' she asked. I was ready for this. 'The real one,' I replied. She pointed behind her. There, arrayed on a long shelf, were all of Auster's books, and next to them the books of Dashiell Hammett, and next to those the books of William Burroughs. 'People steal them,' she said. So here, then, was the all-too plausible solution to my little mystery. Money. No mystery at all, in fact. Just a neatly constructed plot of cause and effect. In the confrontation between fiction and reality, reality had once again won hands down.

I exchanged my dollars for Auster's The Music of Chance, stepped out into the rag-and-bone shop that is Manhattan on an everyday afternoon, and began to read: 'For one whole year he did nothing but drive ... he hadn't expected it to go on that long, but one thing kept leading to another...' One thing will keep leading to another, right up to the end, the last word. That's reality. In the meantime, there was the man himself to meet. I wasn't going to give up that easily.

You will find Paul Auster, most days, in his large brownstone house situated in a leafy residential street in Brooklyn. The door will be opened by his tall, elegant wife, Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, and as Auster descends the stairs you will remark how exactly he resembles the photos that front a number of his books; the advertisement of the man: beautiful, yes; a long, lean face, with two vertical creases in his cheeks, exquisitely arched brows, darkly gentle eyes that stare guardedly out from hooded lids. If you have read his two autobiographical books, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth, you will also know that it is from his mother, still alive, that he gets his adventurousness, his generosity, his tenderness.

A tenderness that can lead him to write in his Prayer for Salman Rushdie: 'I pray for him every morning, but deep down I know that I am also praying for myself.' A tenderness for experience because it is human.

From his father comes his suspicion, his inwardness, his pride, his dogged adherence to the task in hand, his capacity for ant-like labour. And his respect for craft. Sam Auster, now dead more than 20 years, was a gifted radio engineer who, in the 20s, was hired to work at Thomas Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park in New Jersey. There is a family story that Edison sacked the 18-year-old Sam after just one day, 'for being a Jew'. That was in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash. Sam was not crushed. He went on to open a radio shop, in Newark, which, in turn, became a furniture shop. By the time Paul was born in 1947, the family was not yet affluent - that came later with his father's property speculation - but it was not struggling. Still, his father maintained his lifelong habit, the reluctance to spend money, embarrassing his small son by haggling with shopkeepers - promising presents that were never delivered. Always some excuse, some little drama, some new withholding.

Impossible for a child to comprehend an adult's ambiguous relationship to money - the desire to make it, the refusal to enjoy it. Impossible, too, for an adult not to know the imperative of money - that a man can die for lack of it. A man who has come from abject poverty - as Auster's father had, out of eastern Europe and a city named Stanislav - can develop an undue reverence for money. For, as Auster says, money is always more recognisable by its absence than by its presence. 'When I had no money, I used to have to think about it more.' As love is more recognisable by its absence. 'There was never any feeling of malevolence about my father. It's not that he was unfriendly, it's just that he was sealed off. There was a kind of distractedness there.'

Clearing away the detritus of his father's life after he had died, Auster came across a letter to him from a former tenant, a Mrs JB Nash, who had left her apartment in 1964 owing Dollars 40 in rent. In the letter, written in 1976, she enclosed Dollars 40 with the words, 'You was never forgotten by me.' Reading it, Auster broke down and wept: for his father's 'many little kindnesses', kindnesses he knew nothing of. It is kindness that interests him now. 'And the older I get, the more interested in it I become. Goodness makes me cry, not evil. Evil you steel yourself against. But when someone does something good that they don't have to do. That gets to me.'

His parents' marriage was not a good one, 'a mismatch'. 'It was not long before my mother realised her mistake.' They divorced when Paul was 15 and his sister, a fragile child, not even 12. This could lead you to conclude that, as the sensitive child of a loveless union, he would later invest a great deal in his own marriage. And this would be right. It's not so much the way that he talks to Siri as the way he listens to her, the way his eyes follow her around when she is in the room. But this is not all. Catastrophe is in the blood. His first marriage ended badly, not long after his son, Daniel, was born. 'It was a mistake. People make mistakes, you can marry the wrong person.' Mistake is a harsh word. 'Yes. But if a marriage ends because you are both unhappy, you can say you made a mistake.' Some refusal here, but of what? To say what cannot be said? That love does not endure. That a beloved child can be conceived without love. Just as he was conceived - he has written, 'in a passionless embrace' - on his parents' honeymoon at Niagara Falls. He is a devoted father to Daniel, now 21, and Sophie, 12, his daughter with Siri. 'You know,' he says. 'You know what it's like.' All his childhood, he was a studious, well-behaved little boy. 'Not one of those kids who live only for adult approval' - fun, well-liked by his peers, a good sportsman. 'Sport was my life from age five to 15.' He went to Columbia University. His life seemed mapped, a pattern imposed. And then, aged 20, he just left. Took himself out of the pattern. He left university and went to work on an oil tanker, as a skivvy.

Between 1967 and 1971, he travelled back and forth between New York and Paris. And then, in 1971, he left New York to go and live in Paris. He stayed there three years. 'I think I needed to get away. It was the time of the war here, there was so much noise. I couldn't think straight. I wanted to find out if I could be a writer. I didn't think I could find that out here.' So, he placed himself in exile. He says he has always been physically strong, but this shift must have taken all the stamina, mental and physical, that he had. He took himself out of the world of cosy acquiescence and went to Paris with nothing. An ideal is all he had. An ideal to let writing take over his world - that was 25 years ago.

He repeats a quotation: 'Anyone who becomes a poet is always, in some relationship to his world, an exile.' And: 'In this most Christian of worlds all poets are Jews.' In other words, an outsider. To write, he says, you have to be out of the world. 'Anyone who is making art of any kind is out of the world. You can't be in it in order to do it.' This idea is at the centre of all of his work - an attempt to identify the world as part of literature, and not literature as part of the world. To undermine confidence in the idea that there is such a thing as straightforward reality. To reveal how only fiction can explore the mysterious levels of life hidden in our rational mind. So many of his novels resemble the telling of a dream conveyed with all its inconsistencies, its aimlessness; uncanny tales, balanced somewhere between the unspeakable and that which must be told.

And it is a compulsion, he says. Writing is a strange machine, one that he is not in control of. 'I've never had an idea for a story in which I set out to prove something. I have never wanted to write a story about anything - the isolation of modern man, for instance. What happens is that something that wasn't there the day before is here today. I have lots of ideas, and most of the time I spend pushing them away, looking for an excuse how not to do something. Then, sometimes, the idea is so compelling it won't go away. Simply, one gets gripped and you enter an imaginary world.' In the very process of writing, you become someone else. Maybe it is this, finally, that makes him so elusive. It is not his intention. 'I am not very good at this,' he says, 'as you see. But I am trying hard.' It's as if every attempt to get at the man draws you only closer into his imaginary world.

So now I sit in this pretty house surrounded by the attributes of money. Not ostentatious, but comfortable. A house, Auster says, 'probably once owned by a banker. Yes, I think a banker lived in this house.' And he laughs. You can see why he would find this funny. A house once kept up by a man whose life's work was the making of money is now kept up by a man whose life's work is the moulding of words. For Auster, money is always reality, the world - as the self is always a fiction. When these two fuse, as they finally have in Auster's life, what does he do? He writes about it.

First, an autobiography, written in the mid-90s. A comic book about a man struggling to become a writer, who is also a man struggling financially to survive. 'I wanted to write an essay about money. I thought I'd call it Essay on Want.' And then a fiction, his new book, Timbuktu - what he calls 'a little book', a story narrated by Mr Bones, a mongrel dog, the companion of Willy G Christmas, an erstwhile poet and a tramp. So many tramps and vagabonds in Auster's work. But then, what is a tramp if it isn't the writer's alter ego? The mirror image of the writer, quite literally a non-entity, a missing person - as the novelist is the missing person in his own fiction? The story begins on the corner of a street in Baltimore. Lots of corners, too, in his work - a vantage point, a choice of paths. He originally thought that Mr Bones and Willy were going to be just minor characters in some much bigger book. But that's what happens, he says. One thing keeps leading to another. Something minor turns out to be something major. 'You take a turning, you begin to think it's the wrong turning, you get lost, you're out there in the rain. And then, suddenly, there's that little inn you've been longing for all your life.' Paris looked like a wrong turning. Three years there living, as he says, in utter penury. Trying to write poems and literary essays. Having to put up with degrading, humiliating involvements simply to earn a crust. Back in New York, he earned money through translations, 'cranking it out'. He invented a card game; he called it Action Baseball. 'Just like real baseball,' he'd tell the card manufacturer's reps as he tried to flog the game at toy fairs. It's not real, but it's real. He wrote a novel, a detective thriller called Squeeze Play, in which an apparent murder turns out to be a suicide. 'I just did it to make money, that's all. It's not a legitimate book.' Both card game and novel are included as appendages in his autobiography - what he calls 'evidence'. Evidence, 'that I was doing everything in my power to prostitute myself. His son had been born, in 1977, but a year later his marriage was on the rocks, everything seemed to be cracking apart. 'I'd spent the best part of a decade in total poverty, working very hard to produce work that I'm not unproud of. To end up with zero.' It was 1979. He was alone, he was writing little. He felt he was falling, 'that the ground was opening up, that the things you clung to before were no longer there.' Then something happened. Some mystery, some miracle, the night before his father died. He had been out to the theatre with friends, to see the work of a performance artist that he admired. Getting home, he couldn't sleep. He sat down to try and write for the first time in a while, and he produced the prose poem White Spaces, a reflection on the gruelling reality of trying to write, trying to find a voice. The next morning, the phone rang with the news that his father was dead.

It was not his father's death that made him a writer - that moment had come the night before. But the money that his father left him enabled him to write. 'It was not a great deal, but it was enough.' For the first time in his life, he could afford to do nothing else. And the first thing he wrote was a reflection on his father, The Invisible Man, and an autobiographical fragment, written in the third person, called The Book of Memory. Five years later came The New York Trilogy, the book that made his name in the world.

Each story is a quest for a missing person. 'The idea at the end is that the questions have been resolved in that the character realises that they never can be resolved.' At this point, Paul Auster becomes completely identified with the image he has of the writer. He has placed himself out of this world, has made himself a character in his own fiction. His next step, the next turning, had to be how to get back in. 'To be both in and out of the world.' It wasn't until the 90s that what had been a heroic, self-lacerating project suddenly and unpredictably changed. He came out of his room, out of the book, and into the world of film. The emergence came, of course, through fiction, as ever his point of entry into the world.

In November 1990, the New York Times rang to ask if he would be prepared to write a short Christmas story for the paper. It was the first time that newspaper had published a work of fiction, and Auster, thinking it funny - a story in a paper of record - immediately said yes. Days before his deadline, he still had no story. 'I was about to ring and say I can't do it. I was staring at this little tin of Dutch cigars that I smoke, and suddenly I began to think about the man who sold them to me. How, in a big city like New York, you have these relationships with people - you can't call them friends, you don't know them - and yet they are cordial relationships, part of the texture of everyday life. Something that makes life much more pleasant.' The story he wrote, Auggie Wren's Christmas Story, became the film Smoke, directed by Wayne Wang, in which Harvey Keitel plays Auggie and William Hurt plays the writer Paul Benjamin. 'Paul, because I wanted to write it like a news story, as though it were true.' And Benjamin because that's his middle name. It is a story about giving and taking - Auggie gives Benjamin his story - about lying and stealing. About arbitrary kindnesses between people. And about the point at which fact and fiction merge. The last scene has Keitel, smiling his Cheshire-cat smile, assuring Hurt that every word of his urban fable is true. 'Bullshit,' replies Hurt - the last word of the film.

After 25 years in his room, the film was 'eye-opening', he says. 'A big revelation. It reminded me that working with other people is fun. It gave me back memories of playing sport as a kid, of playing in teams, of everyone doing his or her best.' It also gave him money. I asked him when he first started to earn his living solely from his writing. The answer is shocking. 'Things got a bit easier in the 80s. I was also teaching at Princeton. But it was only in 1991 that I looked at what I was earning and realised we could get by.' To give some idea, he says, when The New York Trilogy was published in the US, he received Dollars 100 for each book. 'That's hard to live on, even 15 years ago.' So it's pretty recent, he says. 'Pretty recent, and who knows what will happen in the future?' Timbuktu is a novel of reconciliation. Auster calls it 'a love story', told by a dog 'who is and isn't a dog'. The book walks a tightrope between what is plausible and what is not. Clearly, dogs do not talk, but even if they did it is moot that they would talk in the philosophic manner of Mr Bones. What matters, Auster says, is the emotions. 'And because he is a dog, it became possible to express very pure, intense emotions that we all feel.' This is a love story without irony. After Willy's ignominious death on a street corner, Mr Bones cannot endure life without him.

What's odd about this is that, in many ways, his material life is improved by Willy's death. He is taken in by a family and treated, on the whole, well by them. You could say he lands on his feet. On the final page of the book, Mr Bones decides to play an old dogs' game. It's called dodge the car. It's the road to oblivion.

Timbuktu is an expression that commonly signifies the limit of the world Auster explains. 'People say I've been to Timbuktu and back, when half the time all they mean is that they've been on a shopping trip to Manhattan.' Willy G Christmas turns this figure of speech into an image of the afterlife, which Mr Bones, in his dog- ignorance, takes for real. He is going to join Willy in Timbuktu.

A bit shame-faced, I tell Auster that I once made the same mistake as Mr Bones. I'd followed a road in the desert, signposted to Timbuktu, for miles before I realised that it was going nowhere. That it didn't exist. It was just a joke. That's funny, he said. 'That's very funny.' Funny, because, for once, the imagination triumphs over reality. Even if Timbuktu exists, which it does, he says, it's an oasis in the desert somewhere in Africa. Still, it exists more as an idea than as a place. In the world, our world, Timbuktu is fiction. And, as Auster might say, all the more real for that.

This article first appeared in

The Guardian on

Saturday May 29, 1999

By ELAINE LOUIE

When Paul Auster creates his characters for novels and the screen, a chance meeting, a chance phone call often changes the course of a life. Just the sort of thing that happens to Paul Auster, too. Even happened to his dog.

A year ago, Mr. Auster and his young daughter, Sophie, were walking through their neighborhood, Park Slope in Brooklyn. A woman was standing with a skinny golden-yellow dog, its hair wiry, its manner fearful, its provenance motley.

Brooklyn terrier," the author thought. It wore a sign that said "Please adopt me -- I need a home."

No longer. Mr. Auster sat on the terrace of his turn-of-the-century brownstone recently, his "rehabilitated beast," Jack, beside him.

"We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence," he said. "Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

"People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is."

For those who do like his work, however, the dark uncharted world according to Auster is required reading. His characters, sometimes banal, often macabre but also capable of moments of exceptional tenderness, inhabit a world of fun-house distortion. Laughter can be mirthless, anxiety is commonplace, yet love is redemptive. There are beginnings, but not always happy endings.

In "Mr. Vertigo," for example, the young narrator learns to fly, becomes wildly famous -- and is suddenly grounded by puberty. Magic is leavened by reality; life by chance.

Mr. Auster, 48, lives in a house where nothing is left to fate. Each room, shared with his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, is sparely and beautifully furnished. On the coffee table is a vase of white spice-scented lilies. A red dining table is so brilliantly lacquered that it is reflective.

No stray coupons clutter the pristine white kitchen counters. Everything gleams -- the golden oak floors and balustrades, the burnished cherry wood mantel. Propped casually are posters for the two movies that have propelled Mr. Auster to a mass audience, the critically acclaimed "Smoke," for which he wrote the screenplay, and "Blue in the Face," which opens next week and which he both wrote and co-directed.

"This house is a reflection of Siri and her Scandinavian craving for order," Mr. Auster said. "I, unfortunately for my sins, am impervious to my physical surroundings. Not that I don't enjoy it, but I'd be incapable of creating such a place."

The house is for the family -- they have two children -- but not for work. Each day, he walks to a studio, where he writes. "In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive," he said. "Once I'm in my work, I don't notice where I am."

Mr. Auster, who writes six hours a day, five to seven days a week, has been at his craft for more than 25 years; he has come up with 11 books, including eight novels, a book of poetry, a collection of essays and a memoir. He has also translated six books, both poetry and prose, from French to English, and edited The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. Now he is in films. Pure chance, of course.

On Christmas Day 1990, the director Wayne Wang failed to get his daily delivery in San Francisco of The New York Times. He bought the last copy at a grocery store and read a story by Mr. Auster, "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story," that was on the Op-Ed page. He loved its portrait of a white cigar-store manager who pretends to be the grandson of a blind black woman on Christmas to make her happy. Mr. Wang asked his wife, "Who is Paul Auster?" Then he went in search of the answer.

Five months later, Mr. Wang met Mr. Auster in the writer's Park Slope studio. Last year, they made "Smoke," followed immediately by "Blue in the Face," a warm-hearted valentine to Brooklyn, with many of the same characters but mostly improvised dialogue.

Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: "Since so much of what's appealing about 'Smoke' springs simply from character and setting, there's reason to look forward to a looser-limbed take on the same idea."

"Blue in the Face," which also takes place in Auggie Wren's cigar store, stars Harvey Keitel, with cameos by Lou Reed, Roseanne, Madonna and Lily Tomlin.

Next, Mr. Auster will write a screenplay of his novel "Mr. Vertigo," with the collaboration of the screenwriter Philip Haas, who in 1993 adapted Mr. Auster's novel "The Music of Chance" for the screen. Mr. Auster is also writing his ninth novel.

And now, fewer and fewer people are asking, Who is Paul Auster?

His work has been translated into 20 languages. The Times Literary Supplement calls him "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers." "Leviathan" won the 1993 Prix Medicis Etranger, "The Music of Chance" was nominated for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner award.

As success has come to him, so, too, is it just beginning to come to his wife, Siri Hustvedt, 40, who is as blond as her husband is dark. Her first novel, "The Blindfold," came out in 1992 and was well received. It was published in 14 different countries. Michiko Kakutani called it an "impressive and dexterous debut" in The New York Times. Ms. Hustvedt, with David McDuff, translated "Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life" by Geir Kjetsaa from Norwegian into English. She has nearly completed her second novel.

It was afternoon, and their daughter, Sophie, 8, was at school, and Daniel, 18, his son by a previous marriage, was in Maine for a three-week Outward Bound program. Mr. Auster had just received a postcard from Daniel. "Three weeks!" Mr. Auster said. "That's the thing that's frightening -- to stay outdoors for three weeks!"

With his belief that a single moment can irrevocably change a life, Mr. Auster is not a man who believes he has the answers. He may be very much the man of the literary and film moment, but he is not smug.

In "The Art of Hunger," a book of essays, he wrote that the day he finished "The Music of Chance," he was in Vermont, thrilled with himself.

"So there I was, standing on the steps of my little shack, telling myself what a genius I was, when all of a sudden I looked up and saw my 2-year-old daughter in front of the house," he said. She was stark naked, squatting over some stones and defecating. "So, rather than being able to bask in my own brilliance, I had to clean up my daughter's mess. She knocked me off my cloud, and I was very grateful to her for it."

He also stays grounded by that belief that anything can change the course of a life. In 1970, he discovered, by a strange coincidence, that his grandmother Anna Auster had murdered his grandfather Harry Auster. The two had fought about money and an affair he was having, and in 1919, she shot him in Kenosha, Wis. She was later acquitted by reason of temporary emotional insanity.

He heard the story from a cousin, who had heard it by chance from a stranger on an airplane who recognized the last name. "Your grandmother wasn't a crazy little woman with red hair, was she . . . ?" the stranger had begun. Asked if he was horrified that someone in his family might be capable of murder, Mr. Auster said: "No, I'm not startled. People do these things. Why shouldn't it be someone that I knew? The murder explained the contradictory stories about how he died -- by falling off a ladder or a hunting accident or he died in World War II."

His own life has been better documented. After he graduated from Columbia University, he sailed on an oil tanker, lived in France for four years, wrote and translated poetry, and in 1978, in desperate need of money, wrote a detective story that was published in 1982.

In 1979, his life changed. His first marriage collapsed and his father, who seemed to be in perfect health one day, died the next, leaving him just enough of an inheritance to pay the rent and to get on with his writing. In 1981, he went to a poetry reading and met Siri Hustvedt. Death. Money. Love.

A man who tries to leave very little to chance professionally, he nonetheless allowed Avon Books to publish an illustrated version of his 1985 novel, "City of Glass." Art Spiegelman, the inventive creator of "Maus," and Bob Callahan, a writer, developed a series of graphic novels, adaptations of crime novels. "If Art is involved, it's bound to be of high quality," Mr. Auster said.

As a person open to exploration, he avoids telling his children what they should be when they grow up. Daniel, he said, is showing the gift of a photographer.

"Growing up is hard," Mr. Auster said. "You have to suffer, have to have people die on you, you have to fall in love." What worries him is when a child does not fulfill his promise. "You grow up with children who are so small and so talented," he said, "and you cross paths with them 20 years later, and they haven't done much. They are all so -- ordinary."

But that, of course, is before a chance phone call, a chance meeting, changes the courses of their lives.

Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist

By ADAM BEGLEY

Paul Auster writes novels about lonely souls who try to make meaning out of circumstance -- and he writes under circumstances that look suspiciously meaningful: his office, a small studio apartment, is bare and white and smudged with Brooklyn grime. He sits under two naked light bulbs. The window shades are always drawn; were they raised, you would see a brick wall across an air shaft. Auster avoids such distractions. The apartment number is 1-I -- a coincidence he points to with pride. If a trait marks Auster more distinctly than his fertile obsession with the isolated self, it's his romance with coincidence and the curious workings of chance.

A wrong number inspired his first novel, "City of Glass." One day in 1980, long before he could afford an office, he was sitting at home trying to write when the phone rang and a man's voice asked if this was the Pinkerton agency. Auster said no. The same man called the next day and asked again for the venerable detective agency. Auster again set him straight, but he began imagining what would have happened had he said, "Yes, this is Pinkerton's" -- had he impersonated a private eye and offered to take on a case.

"City of Glass" is the first part of "The New York Trilogy," three short, intensely cerebral novels published in 1985 and 1986, which established Auster as a talent to watch: a writer who could tickle the brains of highbrow literary critics and spin a good yarn, too. The novel's protagonist is a solitary writer named Quinn who on three different nights gets a phone call from a man looking for "Paul Auster. Of the Auster Detective Agency." The first two times this happens, Quinn simply tells the man that he has dialed the wrong number, but on the third night Quinn succumbs to impulse and pretends he is Paul Auster, private investigator. What follows is a surreal detective novel at once playful and morbid, in which the clues trace the origins of language and the culprit is the madness on the far side of alone.

"Eight months ago," says the real Paul Auster, his strong, boldly handsome face animated by boyish enthusiasm, "I got a call from a man with a thick Spanish accent who asked for Mr. Quinn. I thought it was some kind of practical joke. Not at all -- the man was in dead earnest. I even asked him to spell out the name, 'Q-U-I-N-N.' " Auster knows how to project excitement, and when he tells a story about coincidence, his eager happiness seems collaborative, a spontaneous joint effort. His eyes -- dark, wide-set, a little protuberant -- reflect wonder at how all things are connected.

Counting "Leviathan," an ambitious new novel due out from Viking early next month, Auster will have published seven novels in the last eight years. This outpouring of fiction has been greeted in America by generally appreciative, sometimes ecstatic reviews -- and slow sales. Viking says it will print 25,000 copies of "Leviathan"; not one of his previous novels has sold more than 20,000 copies in hardcover. In this country, the 45-year-old Auster remains a cult figure, his name familiar to devotees of literary fiction but otherwise little known.

Not so in Europe, where he has become a celebrity, his success nothing short of remarkable. His French publisher, Actes Sud, reports selling roughly 50,000 copies of each new novel -- a stupendous figure, even allowing for a dose of Gallic exaggeration. In the French press he is hailed as a leading American writer. In Germany he is recognized on the street; taxi drivers ask for his autograph. When "The New York Trilogy" -- comprising "City of Glass," "Ghosts" and "The Locked Room" -- came out in England in November 1987, Auster became an overnight sensation: a 5,000-copy first printing sold out in a week. His work has been translated into 19 languages.

The usual way to explain Auster's success abroad is to say that his novels belong to a European tradition and that his philosophical inclination appeals to foreign tastes. "American writers tend to slip into some kind of domestic realism," says the critic Sven Birkerts, "whether it's ranchhouse realism or trailer realism -- not Paul Auster. He's closer to European existentialism." Birkerts, who included an essay on Auster in his recent book "American Energies: Essays on Fiction," claims that Auster has a "philosophical intelligence." "Kafka goes gumshoe," is how one of Auster's early editors describes "The New York Trilogy," and in all of Auster's novels there are echoes of modernist masters -- Samuel Beckett especially. Auster is also steeped in the literature of the American renaissance: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau turn up again and again in the pages of his books. Like Nathanael West (whose novels were almost entirely neglected during his brief lifetime), Auster grafts a European-flavored avant-garde sensibility onto a native gothic tradition. Somber, shot through with mock-portentous symbolism, his novels are enlivened by arch literary games and sustained by the clarity of his prose.

A sample from "City of Glass" shows the hypersensitivity of his characters to any configuration of symbols that seems to spell significance: "Private Eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter 'i,' standing for 'investigator,' it was 'I' in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him."

The novelist Don DeLillo, a friend of Auster's, says, "Paul's accomplishment is building a traditional storytelling architecture with sharply modern interiors." He is especially admiring of Auster's inviting voice. And indeed, if it weren't for Auster's varied talents as a storyteller, his writing might well have been dismissed by critics as a hothouse hybrid, thrilling but precious. The novels he has published since "The New York Trilogy" -- "In the Country of Last Things," "Moon Palace" and "The Music of Chance" -- have all been driven by a compelling story. The first is a quest narrative, a young woman seeking out her lost brother in a post-apocalypse cityscape; the second, an orphan's picaresque cycle of adventure; the third, a tightly plotted fable about a drifter who discovers freedom in responsibility.

Strong stories and clean prose can't wholly absolve Auster of the charge that his hyperliterary concoctions appeal to the head rather than the heart. Sometimes it seems as though he were writing for tomorrow's scholar, offering up in every book a detailed blueprint for future study. As the novelist Gary Indiana put it in a vicious Village Voice review of "Moon Palace," "Auster's sensibility . . . is essentially dry, academic, and theoretical." Indiana compares Auster to "a mechanical engineer impersonating Kafka and Beckett."

But with each new novel, Auster takes another step out into the world. Though he writes in his bare, white sanctum, mulling the fate of the isolated soul, his imagination increasingly encompasses the complex, intertwined lives of men and women who live and work and love in a place that is recognizably contemporary America. The title "Leviathan" signals a continued flirtation with symbolism (the image of the whale conjures up such super-symbolic books as "Moby-Dick," which Auster calls the greatest American novel, or "The Adventures of Pinocchio," another Auster favorite); but by borrowing the title of Thomas Hobbes's rigorous tome on the nature of man and the necessity of state, Auster also announces a new political engagement. The writer's eye, as he would say, looks out from the self into the world.

FIRST, THERE IS the upper case "I": Auster's life is broken in two, and the crisis that marks the break is the quintessential Auster story.

The grandson of first-generation Jewish immigrants, he was born in Newark in 1947, grew up in South Orange and attended high school in Maplewood, 20 miles southwest of New York. The urge to write came early, when he was only 15. "By the time I was 16," he says, "I was in internal exile in New Jersey." Two years later he enrolled at Columbia University and after graduating stayed on for another year to get his master's in comparative literature. In 1970 he spent six months as an ordinary seaman on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Mexico; the plan was to earn enough money so he could scrape by for a while as an expatriate writer in Paris.

He stayed in France for four years, writing poems, translating, living hand to mouth. Back in New York he published four slim volumes of poetry. "Those books had no public life at all," he notes. "They were only read by other poets." Though still chronically broke, he was as intent as ever on a literary career.

"Nineteen seventy-nine. That's when everything changed in my life." It sounds like the opening of one of his novels. But in fact, though he's sitting in his office beneath the two naked lightbulbs, in front of his battered 25-year-old Olympia typewriter he's only talking. Even so, this is a performance, a test of his talents, of his charm: he will give the best interview he can. His subject is pain -- a crucial period of isolation and unhappiness -- but he talks easily, as though anxious not to contaminate a congenial mood. A faint sibilance softens his words.

"That was a crazy year." He was 32 years old, married to Lydia Davis, a writer and translator, with a 2-year-old son, Daniel. "I had run into a wall with my work. I was blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. I was finished." And then, in the space of two months, his father died, his marriage collapsed and he found himself alone -- and writing.

"He was suffering," says Ann Lauterbach, a friend and fellow poet who saw him often during this period. "He was really inside of that solitude, that loneliness, and I don't think he knew at all how he was going to make it through other than by working."

Over the next three months he composed a memoir of his father, Samuel Auster, a distant and difficult man. "He died so suddenly," Auster explains, "and with so much unfinished business left between us." "Portrait of an Invisible Man" is an extraordinary document; there are critics who consider it Auster's best work. Published in 1982 as the first half of a book called "The Invention of Solitude," the memoir tells a story his father never told anyone -- least of all his son:

In 1919 in Kenosha, Wis., when Sam Auster was 8 years old, his mother shot and killed his father. Arrested, she signed a confession. Tried for murder, she was acquitted. Her story moved the jury to pity: an immigrant woman's struggle, abuse at the hands of an unfaithful husband, five small children. Those children kept her secret; the memory of her murdered husband was expunged. Auster and his cousins grew up knowing nothing about their grandfather's death. And they never would have known, except for a chance encounter -- another typical Auster moment. In 1970, one of his cousins met an old man from Kenosha aboard an airplane. He told the cousin about the events of 1919 and later sent her clippings from The Kenosha Evening News, a complete record of the scandal -- a hidden trauma finally revealed.

But for Paul Auster, no mystery has a simple solution, and the search for his father becomes an epistemological puzzle: "One could not believe there was such a man -- who lacked feeling, who wanted so little of others. And if there was not such a man, that means there was another man, a man hidden inside the man who was not there, and the trick of it, then, is to find him. . . . To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure."

There are bitter moments in "Portrait of an Invisible Man," but compassion and forbearance win out in the end -- compassion for a man who lived and died cut off from himself and others.

"There has been a wound," Auster wrote, "and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. . . . Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever."

Writing kept open the wound, but the wound, one might add, kept him writing. He worked his usual strict schedule, six days a week, six or seven hours a day, writing longhand in notebooks and typing out finished passages.

He wrote prose, not verse -- he says he hasn't written a poem in 13 years. His poetry, he explains, "was always a very compact, univocal expression of feeling. Prose is vast. . . ." He pauses, searching for the right words. "It allows me to speak out of both sides of the mouth at once." His themes were primed for elaboration.

A further legacy from this period of crisis, the kind of coincidental convergence Auster can't resist: he inherited from his father a modest sum of money, just enough to cushion the next six busy years until his second career as writer earned him at last a secure income.

IT'S A THREE-MINUTE walk down pleasant tree-lined streets from Auster's office to his apartment. On a bright day in early summer he dresses in black -- jeans, shirt, sneakers, all black. He wears dark glasses and smokes little cigars at a furious rate.

Add up the outfit, the grim office, certain gloomy passages from his work, and he might start looking like a tortured soul. In fact, he's full of good cheer. The black wardrobe fits with a seductive, offhand, faintly bookish glamour: he's tall and slim and set apart by his striking face -- he has, as a friend puts it, "a powerful sensual presence." A slight stoop, like a hesitation in his posture, helps you remember that he's an intellectual, editor of the Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry, a translator of Stephane Mallarme, a bona fide man of letters who has taught writing and translation at Princeton University. He's careful not to intimidate: he's a devoted Mets fan, a regular guy who doesn't mind telling you how important it was for him to beat his brother-in-law last time they played basketball one on one.

He lives in a handsome, turn-of-the-century limestone building, the kind of row house that makes Park Slope one of Brooklyn's best neighborhoods. The third-floor apartment is light-filled and spotless, with bare wood trim, tall ceilings, a few simple American antiques, and lots of lively art on the walls. It's a bit of a shock after the barren, dingy office.

Auster introduces his wife, Siri Hustvedt, who is tall and thin, too, but blond, with looks as striking as her husband's. She is of Norwegian descent, which is how Auster accounts for the uncanny neatness of the apartment. Like her husband, she exudes the kind of casual chic not generally associated with scholars -- and yet she earned her doctorate in English literature from Columbia in 1986. Her first novel "The Blindfold," was published in April to mostly favorable reviews, some of which suggested that her work resembles Auster's. (He disagrees but adds: "We're very much alike. We live in the same mental and emotional world.")

To illustrate the momentous consequence of serendipitous events, Auster likes to say: "The fact that I'm married to Siri, which is probably the most important thing in my life, is complete chance. The way we met was just a fluke -- and I would not be who I am right now if it were not for her, I can guarantee that." They met at a poetry reading in 1981 and fell instantly in love. "I looked at him," says Siri, "and that was it for me." They were married in 1982; a daughter, Sophie, was born five years later.

They don't go out much -- more, recently, but it's still a quiet life. "If I were craving the limelight, I'd be out there," he says, a remark that sounds too bald, too cocky to come from the expertly self-effacing Paul Auster. And then one discovers -- though not because he says so -- that he was asked to do a Gap ad, to pose in a T-shirt as a slick celebrity author; he turned it down. He and Siri were asked to do another commercial, this time to sell American beef in Japan -- $25,000 for a day's work; they turned it down. "I don't like advertising," he explains.

His friends are artists and writers, including Don DeLillo and the novelist Peter Carey. "Peter and I tend to drink a lot of wine together," says Auster says. "I have an amazing capacity to hold the stuff. It shocks me."

"Within a circle of intimate friends, he's a very sociable person," says Russell Banks, another novelist, who has known Auster since 1977. "Outside of that circle, he's fairly shy and reticent."

Auster talks about his private life with reverence and joy: his daughter, Sophie; his son, Daniel, now 15 years old; the relative quiet of Brooklyn; the ramshackle farmhouse in Vermont they rent during the summer -- the successful writer's ideal. One can't help wondering whether the image of flawless domestic happiness is somehow necessary to him. One friend suggests that he likes to present a stylized portrait of his life with Siri: "It's not at all a question of dishonesty. It's just one of the ways he tries to please. People see a beautiful, thriving couple and they want to believe. Paul obliges."

According to Banks, Auster is not given to confession. "One way to keep his private life private is to smooth over the seams." Gerald Howard, another friend and also the first editor at a major publishing house to acquire one of Auster's manuscripts, says, "Paul has got his mental ecology in balance -- he saves the dark stuff for his art."

Though Auster is ready and willing to enumerate the hardships he encountered in the early 80's, all those troubles are professional -- clouds can pass over his office, it seems, but not his home. Back in his office, he talks about a seemingly endless string of rejections: he finished "City of Glass" in 1982, and over the next two years the manuscript was turned down 17 times. Sun and Moon Press, a tiny Los Angeles publisher, finally agreed to take a chance on it, but Auster wasn't even paid an advance. "When I couldn't find a publisher for 'City of Glass,' " he says, "I resigned myself to writing unpublished books. I wasn't going to stop writing -- I came to terms with that, and it's a good thing, because then you know why you're doing it. It's not for money, it's not for glory, it's not for readers, it's not for anything but the fact that you have to do it."

These days he would have no trouble finding a dozen willing publishers. Viking paid him an advance of roughly $400,000 for the world rights to his last two books. But he still has doubts about the social usefulness of his profession. He contends that a plumber is more valuable than a writer. "I'm constantly questioning the thing that I do," he says. "It's certainly a stupid way to live your life, isolating yourself every day, making something nobodyreally needs or wants -- the world can do very well without the books I write." He stops to light a cigar. The ashtray is crowded with crushed, blackish nubs. "It's not even that writing gives me a lot of pleasure. It's hard work. You suffer a lot. You feel inadequate. The sense of failure is enormous -- no sense of glory or triumph, no sense of satisfaction. It's just that when I'm not writing I feel lost; I feel that I'm not living to any purpose whatsoever."

With these last remarks he has come around to one of the essential subjects of "Leviathan": the writer's purpose, his place in the world.

"LEVIATHAN" IS DEDICATED to Don DeLillo, a friend for the last eight years -- and now, it seems, a literary influence. In "Mao II," DeLillo's most recent novel, a reclusive writer says, "Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken over that territory." This remark could be the secret motto of "Leviathan": the book begins with the news that a man named Benjamin Sachs, a novelist, has been blown to bits by a bomb he was assembling.

The story of how Sachs came to be building bombs is told by another novelist, Peter Aaron (note the initials), a well-intentioned, naive, slightly obtuse narrator. The details of Aaron's life match Auster's. For example, Aaron writes his rushed history of Sachs (he feels he must finish before the F.B.I. cracks the case) at a ramshackle Vermont farmhouse. The coincidence of superficial biographical detail turns into a kind of in-joke (Aaron's wife is Iris -- Siri backwards); a deeper, more complicated sympathy links Auster to the doomed Sachs.

"Sachs," Auster says, "is somebody torn between his gift -- which is literary -- and something in him that is constantly pushing him out into the world to make a real difference in a concrete way." For Auster, that same conflict was resolved at an early age: at Columbia in the spring of 1968, he was offered the opportunity to choose politics over art, bomb-making over book-writing. He joined the Students for a Democratic Society, marched in protests. "I was in sit-ins, got arrested, got kicked by the cops. I'm very glad I did it." He was never a leader in student politics. "I was an engaged observer," he says, "a peripheral participant" -- and despite the excitement, he always knew he was going to spend the rest of his life as a writer.

The politics of "Leviathan" are somewhat fuzzy -- but then again it's a novel, not a polemic. Sachs's terrorism consists of blowing up replicas of the Statue of Liberty, a way to force a crucial American symbol to the forefront of the nation's consciousness. As the self-styled Phantom of Liberty, Sachs phones in messages to newspapers after each explosion. "He simply wanted America to look into itself and mend its ways. In that sense, there was something almost Biblical about his exhortations, and after a while he began to sound less like a political revolutionary than some anguished, soft-spoken prophet."

Some people are sympathetic to Sachs's aims: "His bombs hadn't hurt anyone, they argued, and if these two-bit explosions forced people to rethink their positions about life, then maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all." A very literary terrorist indeed. Aaron doesn't make the connection, but the impact of these "two-bit explosions" sounds like an author's fondest hope for novel-writing -- a way of looking at literary production that makes a writer at least as valuable as a plumber.

Auster has brought to "Leviathan" his bag of exotic tricks -- brain-teasers, wild coincidence, looming symbols, magically receding certainty. But Peter Aaron's measured narrative voice allows only a muted display of literary pyrotechnics. Aaron, who resembles Auster minus political conscience and several degrees of wit, understands life in terms of the affective links between people. His descriptive catalogue of the lovers and friends he and Sachs have shared makes "Leviathan" Auster's most accessible, engaging book. And Auster treats us to his best clear-eyed prose.

None of this, however, guarantees the attention of a wider American audience, the kind of readership that would make him as prominent here as he is in Europe.

If "Leviathan" doesn't do the trick, maybe the movies will. He's working on a screenplay for Wayne Wang, who made "Chan Is Missing," and collaborating with the German director Wim Wenders. All of Auster's novels, no matter how tangled in introspective cerebration, have been optioned for film at one time or another. His most recent, "The Music of Chance," has been made into a movie starring James Spader and Mandy Patinkin and directed by Philip Haas, a prize-winning documentary film maker. Auster has a cameo role in the film, which is scheduled for release early next year. Who knows? Brooklyn taxi drivers may start asking for his autograph.