There is something bittersweet about discovering a writer you have long disdained as small beer: the pleasure of an untapped well, followed immediately by the question of how your sensibility was so eluded by a major figure.
Such was my opinion of Paul Auster. I regarded him from a distance as a certain kind of American literary novelist: self-regarding, architecturally post-modern, finally thin. Something drew me, finally, toward his non-fiction autobiographical work, The Red Notebooks, Winter Journal, The Invention of Solitude, which I am now reading. He writes brilliantly of mortality and ageing, and of how doubt inserts itself over time, undermining once fixed certainties.
It may have been reading Lydia Davis’s first essay collection that pulled Auster into my orbit. Now I can’t get enough of his voice.
He’s a complicated one for me. I loved his early writing (The Invention of Solitude, Red Notebook, New York Trilogy, even County of Last Things), but then I feel like he became a parody of himself, and each new work became worse than the last, increasingly pretentious and increasingly empty. Someone ruined by success. Then I had the misfortunate of seeing him read, and the arrogance and self-satisfaction was just more than I could take. But … the early stuff is special.
It’s the early stuff I’m discovering, though I loved Winter Journal (is that mid-journey?).
I do think it’s sometimes timing. I’ve dismissed an author and then gone back to them and been knocked out. Auster certainly impressed me when I revisited his work after decades.
Agreed. It goes the other way too, all too often.