Smash hit

As we talk, Auster, darkly handsome, lies diagonally across his armchair like a latter-day Lytton Strachey. At first, I mistake it for a Victorian affectation. But he later explains that he was afflicted by phlebitis — a vein inflammation — during a weekend round-trip flight to Copenhagen. “On the way over I fell asleep with my leg in some cramped position,” he says. “It did not happen right away. About a week later I woke up and I felt like a dog was biting me.” Around the same time, Auster also survived a major car crash. He says he “miscalculated” as he and Hustvedt brought their teenage daughter Sophie home to Brooklyn from a camp in Connecticut. A van slammed into the passenger side of the car. Hustvedt had to be cut out, and everyone was rushed to hospital. “The car was destroyed. When we went to the lot, I could not believe we had survived,” he says. “It was a very close call.”

The two events seem to have accentuated Auster’s sense of mortality. “I did notice that when I turned 50, aches and pains that had existed in my body before, I suddenly started to notice,” he says. “The sense of breaking down does give you pause. I had always been extremely fit and youthful and never really sick.” His last three books — Timbuktu, The Book of Illusions and Oracle Night — have all featured men confronting decline. Auster suggests packaging them as “The Trilogy of Debilitated Men”.

From the brief sample he offered at his reading, Auster’s next book seems to address a similar theme. The narrator is a divorced and jobless former life-insurance executive pushing 60 whose lung cancer has gone into remission. “The shock of the cancer had been so great, I still did not believe in the possibility of surviving it,” he says. Nevertheless, when his daughter suggests that he adopt a project to keep himself occupied, he agrees. The project is a chronicle of his and others’ mistakes and foibles called The Book of Human Folly — a book-within-a-book typical of Auster’s metafiction. It looks as though he’s well on the way to completing “The Quartet of Debilitated Men”.

Oracle Night is published by Faber (£15.99, offer £12.79 plus £2.25 p&p)

Selected bibliography

Fiction: The New York Trilogy (1987)

Screenplay: Smoke (1995)

Autobiography: Hand to Mouth (1997)

Criticism: The Art of Hunger (1998)

Poetry: Selected Poems (1998)

‘I was 34 and an old man’

I began with small outings, no more than a block or two from my apartment and then home again. I was only 34, but for all intents and purposes the illness had turned me into an old man — one of those palsied, shuffling geezers who can’t put one foot in front of the other without first looking down to see which foot is which. Even at the slow pace I could manage then, walking produced an odd, airy lightness in my head, a free-for-all of mixed-up signals and crossed mental wires. The world would bounce and swim before my eyes, undulating like reflections in a wavy mirror, and whenever I tried to look at just one thing, to isolate a single object from the onrush of whirling colours — a blue scarf wrapped around a woman’s head, say, or the red tail-light of a passing delivery truck — it would immediately begin to break apart and dissolve, disappearing like a drop of dye in a glass of water. Everything shimmied and wobbled, kept darting off in different directions, and for the first several weeks I had trouble telling where my body stopped and the rest of the world began.

Extracted from Oracle Night, © Paul Auster