Wake Up, America: Paul Auster

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IN BEST-SELLING NOVELS like "The Brooklyn Follies," Paul Auster's characters were transformed by personal events. With his forthcoming novel, "Man in the Dark" (Henry Holt), Auster moves from the personal to the political.

August Brill, a retired book critic and widower, lies in bed recovering from a car accident and conjures an alternate reality in which Al Gore won the 2000 election and Sept. 11 and the Iraq war never happened. Instead, there's a Civil War. It's an intriguing idea, and the Brooklyn resident — who is also a screenwriter, translator and occasional song lyricist — will read from the work at Politics & Prose on Thursday.

» EXPRESS: The San Francisco Chronicle called "Man in the Dark" unlike anything you've ever written. Do you agree?
» AUSTER: No, not at all. Every book that I write is different from all the other books. Each one demands its own form. Each story is a different story. So there are bound to be variations.

» EXPRESS: Did the events of Sept. 11 inspire this story?
» AUSTER: No, it wasn't that. I think the driving force was the election of 2000, which, to me, was a travesty. Gore won. He was elected president. And then Republicans, through political and legal maneuvering, stole it from him. I've had this eerie sense that ever since then, we've been living in a parallel world. The real world has Al Gore finishing his second term.

» EXPRESS: In this book and others, your main characters deal with ailments or injuries. Why the theme of recovery?
» AUSTER: I'm often interested in people who have been through some kind of crisis. It seems to me that that's when we're tested. That's when we find out who we are — the feeling that your life has collapsed and then how do you put it back together? That's what Brill is trying to do. This happens to a number of my characters in books of mine.

» EXPRESS: You're known for having characters reappear in your books. How did you get that idea?
» AUSTER: It's something that came instinctively. I don't walk around dwelling on my past work, yet the characters in those books are still with me. It's as if they're real and I think about them and sometimes wonder, "Well, what are they doing now?" So they sometimes pop up in curious places in other books.

» EXPRESS: I've read you don't use e-mail. But have you ever been on the Web and seen the sites devoted to your work?
» AUSTER: I don't have a computer. Once, someone showed me some of these things. I know there's a Web site about me that someone maintains in the U.K., and I think it's quite good. I looked at it once ... and I never looked at it again.

» EXPRESS: You've written several screenplays, notably one for the 1995 film "Smoke." Has working in film influenced your narrative style?
» AUSTER: Not at all. It's funny. I've always thought of myself as the least cinematic novelist on the planet because my novels tend not to break down into scenes the way films do. They're what you would call ongoing, rolling narratives. Often in my books there isn't that much dialogue. So working in film was a great challenge for me because I had to rethink everything to enter into a new medium and try to explore the possibilities that it offered.

» EXPRESS: How has living in Brooklyn affected your writing?
» AUSTER: I've lived in Brooklyn 28 and a half years. It's the place I've spent the better part of my life. And it's a place I'm very fond of. I've written about it because it's a place I know well. But I don't only want to write about Brooklyn, of course.

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Thu., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness-UDC)

Written by Express contributor Tony Sclafani
Photo by Lotte Hansen