An interview with America's most glamorous literary couple.
By JOHN FREEMANSiri Hustvedt 88 224(photo credit: Courtesy)The Sorrows of an American
By Siri Hustvedt
Henry Holt
320 pages; $25
The voice coming out of the speakers starts in a low whisper, like the first sound one hears upon waking. Then it climbs higher and starts to sing of heartbreak, of loneliness. In a few minutes it has changed again, this time to a bellow-throated, bluesy rasp, full of womanly wisdom and sass.
Listening in on a recent Brooklyn afternoon, novelists Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt shake their heads and tap their feet. Auster wears a smile so big it nearly wraps around the back of his head, while his eyes squeeze shut with pride. And he should be pleased - it's their daughter singing.
"Doesn't she have a great voice?" Auster asks of 20-year-old Sophie. When not finishing up a degree at Bard College, Sophie Auster has been putting together a new album, occasionally appearing with her father, best known for his New York Trilogy series of novels, on stage at events. As soon as the music stops Auster is rifling through other demo CDs. "Oh, don't play the whole album," Hustvedt says, her six-foot frame folded into an armchair. I ask why a girl with a voice like that is bothering with university at all and Hustvedt gives me a stern look. "Let a mother have her dreams," she laughs.
We've been at their Brooklyn brownstone for an hour, talking about Auster's and Hustvedt's two upcoming books, and one gets the sense that this is the first time America's highest-profile literary couple has been completely happy. It's all part of the family business in creation, but they seem more comfortable when the light is turned off them. Daniel, Auster's son from his first marriage, to short-story writer Lydia Davis, is a photographer and DJ. (He made a cameo appearance in Smoke, the 1995 film Auster wrote, as well as co-directed with Wayne Wang.) Sophie is well on her way to a singing career. Still, Auster and Hustvedt have not slowed down - if anything, they have speeded up.
IN THE past decade, the two of them have collectively published or edited more than 17 volumes of poetry, essays, fiction, graphic novels and screenplays. This fall Auster, 61, released a new film he wrote and directed, The Inner Life of Martin Frost, starring Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos (with Sophie in a bit part). And he has a new novel on the way.
Hustvedt, 53, fresh from publishing a series of books heavily indebted to, or about, the art world, has a major new novel out this month, The Sorrows of An American.
"We really live a quiet life," Hustvedt says, as if apologizing for all this culture, sitting now at their red-lacquered dining room table, within eyeshot of an Alexander Calder print. Auster is dressed in shades of black and blue jeans and has pulled out a cigarillo, which he smokes with great relish. The silence of the block, which happens to be home as well to Booker winner Kiran Desai and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, is thick and lush at five o'clock. Hustvedt and Auster have lived here for more than 25 years, after marrying in 1981, long enough to watch the neighborhood clean up and gentrify, then price out the writers who once flocked here.
Like so many people in New York, both of them are spiritual refugees of a sort. Auster hails from Newark, New Jersey, and Hustvedt from Minnesota, where she was raised the daughter of a professor, among a clan of very tall siblings. Auster said good-bye to his own childhood world in his magnificent, wonderfully dense and poetic 1982 memoir, The Invention of Solitude. And now it is Hustvedt's turn to do the same in The Sorrows of an American, which takes pieces of a memoir her late father wrote for his friends and incorporates it verbatim into the story.
"I thought a lot about Invention of Solitude when I was writing this book," Hustvedt says, her posture turned toward Auster. "It was like you were sort of ordering your past in your mind... almost filing it, like it was the mind thinking of itself."
In Sorrows of an American, Hustvedt's characters - a brother (Erik) and sister (Inga) of Norwegian descent living in New York - struggle similarly after their father dies and leaves behind a mysterious series of letters which suggest he may have had something to do with a murder. "I asked my father before he died and he gave his permission," Hustvedt says, "and it meant a lot to me to put it in here."
"They are incredible letters," Auster adds, "and when you put them in there they become something entirely new."
It's not the first time Hustvedt has incorporated the contours of real life into her fiction. Her previous novel, What I Loved, involved an icy poet, a famous artist, his ex-wife and a troubled son, but here Hustvedt has anticipated any such criticisms or literal readings. While Erik tries to sort out his deep dependence on his psychiatry patients, Inga begins to receive insinuating letters and visits from a journalist about her recently deceased husband, a famous writer, about whom the journalist claims to know an embarrassing secret.
One doesn't have to think too hard to see the veiled jab at prying journalists who have put Auster's and Hustvedt's personal life into American tabloids before. Jokingly, Hustvedt plays along. "See, I killed Paul!" she laughs, referring to Inga's late husband. "Seriously, though, he's nothing like Paul, he's older, he lives a totally different life."
As much as she laughs at their celebrity, Hustvedt admits to bracing herself for this publication, like all others. "You're nervous," Auster says, straight out. Hustvedt claims not to read any reviews or profiles. "It's not the mean things, it's the things which wind up casually wrong."
The one thing The Sorrows of an American pulls from real life is the psychiatric detail Hustvedt has braided into the book. Several years ago, she began volunteering at a local mental institution, teaching writing classes to patients as a way to better understand Erik's milieu and mind-set. She might have over-studied. To prove herself worthy, she took the New York state licensing exam for psychologists and passed. Part of this wound up in another book, in the form of a 10-page history of psychopathy which Auster encouraged her to cut out. "I was so reluctant to give it up, and of course he was right."
AS USUAL, Auster read The Sorrows of an American in progress - "I showed it to him in 80-page chunks," Hustvedt says, looking over, "hoping he would say: 'You're on the right path, keep going,' which is mostly what [he] said." Meanwhile, Auster read to her once a month from his new novel, Man in the Dark, a short book that will be released in the US at the end of August.
The Iraq War, which has been in Auster's thoughts nearly constantly and about which he has made critical public statements, is very much present in the book. "The whole book takes place in one night," Auster says. "It's a man lying in bed, and he can't sleep, and he's making up stories, and remembering his life. But he's making up stories in order not to think about certain things that are too depressing to think about."
In sharing their work, Hustvedt is more apt to give Auster feedback about small word changes, while he occasionally identifies things which can be cut. "I kept telling Paul," when I came downstairs at the end of the night, "I finished another beat."
"That's right," Auster remembers.
"Each beat was a kind of breath I had to pull out," Hustvedt continues. "I was always listening for the next beat."
"Where to start," Auster interjects.
"I started to think of the book as a fugue," Hustvedt says, "as much to him as to me."
In this fashion, Auster and Hustvedt play off each other, finishing each other's sentences, circling around from the issues of language and memory running through her new novel, to Kant and cognitive science and how it prepares us for what we see.
"Can I interject?" Auster asks at one point. "I've never seen anyone look at a painting more closely than Siri does."
"I just hang out for a couple hours," Hustvedt explains. Auster then reminds Hustvedt how she found a phantom image in a Goya painting at the Prado in Madrid several years back, causing ripples in the art world.
"Would you say with figurative painting," Auster asks, "that looking at paintings is like studying a text? You have narrative in dramatic paintings, and you have to know the narrative to understand the painting?"
Hustvedt thinks about this for a bit and then agrees, but continues. "I have a very inter-subjective view way of looking at art," she says, looking at me now. "Its not as if I am some superhuman being who comes down from on high and explains it. For me it's a dialogue between the traces of a consciousness and my own consciousness."
Watching Auster and Hustvedt interact intellectually, one can appreciate why artists and writers keep appearing in her work. You can also see why they don't work in the same house. (Five years ago, I interviewed Hustvedt and stopped, when I thought I heard someone beating on a set of drums in the house: "That's Paul typing," Hustvedt explained with a wry smile.)
"I haven't worked here for four years so now," Auster says. "We had done some work in the house, and I was getting interrupted all the time, so I thought, to hell it with, I'm going to go back to my old system of working outside the house."
With his gravel-voice, 10-yard-stare eyes and shelf of novels about the elusive quality of memory, chance and identity, Auster doesn't seem like the kind of writer who would work in a sun-drenched studio. But that's exactly what he has been doing for the past few years, writing in the top-floor apartment of a nearby brownstone. "Nobody calls, except a few people who have the number. So if the phone rings I know that it's important."
"And it works for me because I don't have to hear the typewriter," Hustvedt laughs.
While they write and think in close proximity, Auster and Hustvedt are finding it harder and harder to be together once their books are done.
Starting this month, when Hustvedt's novel comes out, they are going to have large chunks of time apart, which is one reason why they were both extremely happy to be making their maiden voyage to Australia for Writers Week at the Adelaide Festival of Arts. "I think they have you on a panel about life and me on a panel about death," Auster laughs.
It's not an entirely comic approach. As much as they are alike, the work is vastly different. "Somebody said, Paul's books are built like stones, and mine are like rivers," Hustvedt says.
And so America's most productive literary mill keeps producing, one word at a time.
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