Paul Auster: A rare cultural icon who engaged and entertained

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City of Glass(1985), the first volume of his New York trilogy, which I first read as a teenager, and Hand to Mouth(1997), a memoir that bore the subtitle, A Chronicle of Early Failure, which I discovered in the throes of an extended mid-life crisis. City of Glass is one of Auster’s most iconic works, a breathtaking work of staggering genius, to riff off the title of Dave Eggers’ celebrated novel.

It’s one of those books, no matter at what age you read it, it leaves your head and heart spinning. Before I come to it, though, it’s sobering to begin with Hand to Mouth, a study of the universal struggles that aspiring, and published, writers must grapple with throughout their lives.

Hand to Mouth, appearing at the height of Auster’s fame, is a blow-by-blow account of what it felt like for a young man to drop out of Columbia University, move to France, and make a living as a translator, reviewer and occasional writer, with his wife and infant son to support, in the early 1970s. It’s a hard-hitting portrait of “the writer in the attic" trope, shorn of all the faux glamorous appeal that has been accruing on this figure over the years.

Of course, in hindsight, Auster was probably insulated by his white privilege, an American passport that could take him back home anytime he wished for a semblance of social security. But Hand to Mouth is a testimony to his staying power, as well as that of his first wife, the writer and translator Lydia Davis.

It’s a chronicle of rejection from a series of publishers, of being forced to adopt habits of frugality that left very little leeway and observing how the wretched of the earth—figures like Maria, a single mother of three, and Tony, a homeless guy—make their way through life. It’s necessary