If the novelist's God is chance

thinking of Paul Auster a year on

I wake some time around two. Stones in my chest. Something is wrong. It’s been a long time since I woke like this and now because it’s extraordinary, I notice it in ways I didn’t when it was common place. I lie and watch the stars for a while, knowing it’s game over as soon as I touch my phone but it does nothing to ease the feeling. A while later and I think of how although it’s the first of May now, it was the 30th of April when I went to bed, a year since Paul Auster died, and although this feeling in my chest likely has little to do with this, I start to think of his last novel, Baumgartner. Some things are good to think with.

I think of the passage in it where Baumgartner recounts meeting his now dead wife, Anna (a coincidence that we were both writing our Annas at the same time), I think of it and how it is one of my favourite passages, simply for the truth of it, the game of chance we all play every day. I believe there’s a point in every book where the author gives themselves away. I find this belief terrifying because I know exactly where I do the same in both of mine and I do not like giving myself away. I think Auster does in this part, where he exposes again that all his work revolves around chance; the cruelty and the beauty of it, its long reach. This is the passage I think of and with:

‘eight months went by until he ran into her again, but of course he remembered her, and for reasons that are still unfathomable to him, she remembered him as well, and then it started until they were married five years later and his true life began, his one and only life that lasted until she ran into the Cape Cod surf nine summers ago and encountered the fierce monster wave that broke her back and killed her, and since that afternoon, since that afternoon -’

I think about this a lot because of the phrase and his true life began, mostly because this doesn’t always happen to everyone, and if you’re lucky it happens once and if you’re on very good terms with chance, it might happen again, depending on how you see beginnings. And then the ending - that fierce monster wave (it just now occurs to me how both our Annas encounter waves in one sort or another), just as subject to chance.

When Auster was 14, he and others were caught in a thunder storm. He saw one of the boys be hit by lightning. The boy died. It could have easily been Auster. Perhaps it is this that brought him so close to chance. After Auster’s death last year, his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, wrote about Auster’s love of stories. She used a phrase I now use when I’m teaching, where she speaks about Auster’s phrase the mechanics of reality - something that seems to feed into his central preoccupation with chance.

This idea of the mechanics of reality is that human lives do not conform to the dull dictates of cultural conventions that pinch perception, distort the world, and claim to represent the real. The mechanics of reality include wild coincidence, astounding fact, and bizarre discovery, or so it seems to us. All such events appear through the filter of human consciousness. We select bits of pieces of experience, turn them into narratives, and make meaning from them.

If reality seems wildly coincidental or full of astonishing facts or bizarre discoveries, this is because it’s a lesson the novelist tends to learn early. One sees a camp mate die, the other’s aunt dies, a father leaves, someone hurts you when you’re young enough to still believe in goodness - unsafe things happen, insane things happen, the truth as my grandmother used to say, is stranger than fiction. It is these mechanics of reality that create a rupture in the novelist, a point we keep coming back to, a central problem we hope to solve but also hope we never do - without these points, would we make what we do? I think of Maggie Nelson’s claim in Bluets and one I put in The Last Days - I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any of these words; I would rather have you by my side than all the blue in the world. I wonder though.

I spoke to a visual artist artist at EIBF last year about preoccupations, how you can go wide and shallow with your ideas, but maybe you’ll never get anywhere particularly meaningful, or you go narrow but deep, in the way Auster did, in the same way Ian McEwan did in his early work - also preoccupied with the dime spin of chance. In the same way a lot of the artists I admire do. Perhaps the most natural thing for a novelist to be preoccupied by are these mechanics of reality - because he was articulating the complex patterns of often unpredictable interactions that affect every life and which became part of his fiction. In some ways, our tragedies repeat because of the limits of human experience - every story to a greater or lesser degree is a love story of sorts - whether it’s about a dead wife or a dead daughter or that the hero sets out on their journey in search of love or returns home because of love. We call things Shakespearian when really what we mean is it conforms to this mechanics of reality - that in reading about fictional lives and the wild vagaries of chance, we come closer to the truth of our own lives, that we are all subject to it, every day, in this way, chance becomes our only God, the thing we make meaning from, and form a communal experience around.