Understanding Paul Auster

This book offers a survey of the work of a Brooklyn-born author best known for mixing absurdism and crime fiction. Understanding Paul is a comprehensive companion to the work of a writer who effectively balances a particular combination of Jewish American identity and European sensibility across an impressive breadth of novels, screenplays, essays, and poetry. James Peacock views Auster as chiefly concerned with the individual's problematic relationship with language, a theme present from the enigmatic poetry of Auster's early career to the more inclusive and optimistic imaginings of the films Smoke and Blue in the Face and the novels Timbuktu, The Brooklyn Follies, and Man in the Dark. In mapping the evolution of Auster's fiction, Peacock finds in Auster a view of language as inherently ethical and communal because, to use language creatively, one must be immersed in the plurality of experience and listen to the voices of others. Peacock suggests that in the aftermath of 9/11, much of Auster's fiction places even greater importance on sympathetic relations with ordinary individuals and advocates through artistic endeavors the merits of connecting with others.