Because the great American novel ended with Paul Auster

Philip Roth in 2018, aged 85. Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison in 2019, at 88. And then Cormac McCarthy last June, a few weeks before turning 90. Now, with the death of Paul Auster (who passed away in New York on 30 April) American literature has lost a another of his most loved and well-known voices. The list of obituariesin fact, it would be even more complex. Just over a month ago, for example, the 93-year-old John Barth, recognized master of postmodernism, passed away. The impression is that the family of the Great American Novel – at least as we have understood it for a long time – is thinning to the point of almost disappearing. There is no recent news of the elusive Thomas Pynchon, who should celebrate his 87th birthday in a few days, and Don DeLillo, born in 1936, is still active, but overall the picture is becoming depopulated. Not that American writers are disappearing, that’s clear. There are many of them, and they are widely translated throughout the world, especially in Italy, where what was once called “translation literature” enjoys lasting prestige. Any names? Jonathan Franzen, Ottessa Moshfegh, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and here too – if desired – the catalog could go on for quite a while. In the passage from one generation to the next, however, something has changed.

This can be understood well by taking a retrospective look at the work of Auster, who at 77 years of age remains the most relatively young of the recently deceased notable writers (in Italy, let’s remember, his books are published by Einaudi). Like Roth, he was originally from Newark, New Jersey, but had quickly established himself as New York’s storyteller. An antonomasia sanctioned by the famous trilogy in which they converge Glass city, Ghosts And The closed roomnovels which appeared in rapid succession between 1985 and 1987. In full minimalism, Auster’s writing claimed an essentiality of a radically different nature, by virtue of which the parody of a genre all-american how the urban detective story could be loaded with unexpected meanings: melancholic, introspective, metaphysical. His inspiration was not religious, even if his bibliography includes a decidedly curious book, I thought my father was God (2001), in which Auster reworked in his own style the personal stories confided to him by listeners of National Public Radio. More than by providence, her imagination was guided by what, in one of his most representative titles, is defined as “the music of chaos”.

Inexplicable coincidences, revealing synchronicities, a sense of magic that pervades reality without contradicting it. It derived from this intuition, for example, the device of 4 3 2 1 of 2017, a virtuosic variation on the theme of destiny, with the same character who lives a different existence from time to time depending on the combination of events. This book, which has had a mixed reception, is Auster’s most conscious approximation to the project of the Great American Novel. Perhaps, however, his most characteristic feature as a writer does not lie in the pursuit of a chimera which, since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century with the Moby Dick by Herman Melville, is characterized by its spurious and elusive nature. Poet and film director as well as narrator, Auster was in fact a formidable first-person narrator, starting from The invention of solitudethe 1982 memoir that launched his career, leading to the splendid senile meditation of Winter diary (2012). It is in the territory where freedom most dominates that writing manifests itself in all its urgency. Not for nothing, Auster’s will is delivered to the Baumgartner, a narrative apologue magnificently played on the mirroring between autobiography and fiction. It may not be the Great American Novel, but it is a great novel, and that’s enough.