Death has no imagination. She is far too predictable. Suffering from cancer, Paul Auster must have watched for it as one waits for the end of a bad novel. His were full of coincidences, mise en abyme, intrigues dotted with pirouettes. He would probably never have written a book ending in such a banal way.

Like Philip Roth, Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, but in 1947. His parents were Jews from Central Europe. Was it because he had lived in Paris in the seventies? The French had made it a bestseller long before the Americans. He had started with poetry, had translated Mallarmé. He groped around before finding his territory, this sort of post-modernism where his joy was in pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet. “The New York Trilogy” pointed this out to the audience. City of Glass (1985), Revenants (1987), The Hidden Room (1988) revealed his singular talent, full of references, fictions with drawers.

For him, chance plays a significant role (“He would conclude that nothing was real except chance,” we read at the beginning of City of Glass). The characters are often authors, detectives, accumulation not being prohibited. They often have lost a wife, a brother, a child. An inheritance of $200,000 falls upon them unexpectedly. Crazy billionaires are holding them hostage. There are tramps who think they are the reincarnation of François Villon, poker champions at the end of their tether, literature professors, mothers hit by a bus. They sleep in Central Park, are passionate about a silent actor who never existed, have names like Marco Stanley Fogg, Jack Pozzi, Henry Dark, Rudolf Born, Benjamin Sachs. Terrorists are trying to blow up all the Statues of Liberty in the country.

The Peter Aaron of Leviathan (1992) claims to have been born the second the atomic bomb pulverized Hiroshima and an artist looks an awful lot like Sophie Calle. The Hector Mann of The Book of Illusions would have been inspired by the Mastroianni of Italian Divorce. Cinema is not absent from its pages. It’s not for nothing that he saw War of the Worlds at six years old and The Shrinking Man at ten years old. This would lead him to work with Wayne Wang on the Harvey Weinstein-produced Smoke and Brooklyn Boogie (1996), which he later deemed “filthy”. For Lulu on the Bridge (1998), with Harvey Keitel and Willem Dafoe, he was 100% responsible. The experience was not repeated, Auster’s gifts behind the camera having hardly struck people’s minds. Because he had invented something. It was not uncommon for these convoluted stories to take place only in the heads of the protagonists. Or the novel considered a magic slate, an art trying to compete with the covers of the Laughing Cow.

Auster has fun with shapes, building Legos using block letters. In Moon Palace (1989), the neon sign of a Chinese restaurant is as important a symbol as Dr. Eckleburg’s glasses in “The Great Gatsby.” Memory is a library, a set of mirrors. This has its charm, and its limits. Some soon accused him of caricaturing himself. Its labyrinths were less surprising. In Timbuktu (1999), we meet a talking dog who feels “pure ontological terror.” The one from the Book of Illusions (2002) only has three legs.

Auster – yes – is skillful, virtuoso, almost a rogue. In his Brooklyn office, he kept ribbons, dozens of which he had purchased in advance so that he could continue typing on his old Olympia machine. He smoked little cigars and drank red wine. He married the novelist Siri Hustvedt. Maybe he remained the little boy who never got over not getting an autograph from baseball player Willie Mays because he didn’t have a pen on him, the fourteen-year-old who had been marked by The Catcher in the Rye or the one who had seen one of his comrades struck by lightning during a summer vacation. He continued to scribble in blue or red notebooks.

The biography he devoted to Stephen Crane (Burning Boy) was a monument. In 4321 (2017), he knitted together the four possible destinies of a New York Jew born in 1947. Land of Blood (2021) focused on the gun violence which is devastating the United States. His last work, Baumgartner, featured a septuagenarian philosophy professor whose wife, poet and translator, has been dead for ten years, no doubt a way of warding off fate. It was not his best book, but it was a kind of fragile, frightened farewell, summarizing a lot of well-known themes. In Paris, black and white portraits of the author adorned advertising masts for the occasion like giant announcements. So long, Mister Paul.

It is reasonable to think that there will always be, as in City of Glass, young ladies reading one of his novels in the lobby of Grand Central. Don’t forget that the book begins with a phone ringing in the middle of the night. A voice asks Paul Auster. It is a mistake. Since April 30, the real number no longer answers.