Compulsively Readable: Paul Auster & Siri Hustveldt (review)

Novelist Paul Auster manages to play with structure and semiotics in a deeply philosophical way while packing in the kind of tall tales commonly heard over a beer. Auster recently conversed with Siri Hustveldt in Portland; 2GQ's faithful correspondent Nora McCrea brings back a report.

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Novelist Paul Auster manages to play with structure and semiotics in a deeply philosophical way while packing in the kind of tall tales commonly heard over a beer. He has a highly populist interest in pure story for a guy described as "Euro-intellectual." Example: he confessed to us that he tried to cram as many stories inside the cover of the book as he could so that "they vibrate against one another like a collage. The space between them creates another meaning for the reader."

All in all, the Socratic dialogue between Auster and Hustveldt put on by Literary Arts last week was an opportunity to witness the long-standing discussion between these two that has helped create Auster’s strudels of narrative and Hustveldt’s finely drawn portraits. Allegedly, the couple—also married—did not reveal the questions to each other beforehand, thereby giving us Florida fresh instead of concentrate.

Admittedly more of a Auster fan, I perked up at the revelation that Auster made himself a character in The Invention of Solitude because, essentially, it sounded cooler that way. A very autobiographically rooted novel dealing with a son and his father, Auster said he could not get it to come out right in first person, that it was "impeding my ability to look at myself. I had to write in third person to separate myself from myself."

In City of Glass, Auster played with linguistic coding of self in a different way by again using his name as a character, but this time because he was "fascinated by the difference in the authorial voice telling us the story versus the name on the cover of the book-object." For her part, Hustveldt said that she had enjoyed writing from a man’s point of view because it "allowed her to inhabit that gender." Perhaps most revealing of all, ultimately, was the way in which the most interesting bits of these stories often came from working through a technical dilemma with choices of language. --Nora McCrea