Report from the Interior
Internationally revered novelist Auster follows Winter Journal (2012), his body-centric memoir, with a high-wire explication of his inner life, from his child’s sense that “everything was alive” to “the birth of self-consciousness” to his first writing attempts. Auster’s phenomenal literary powers are generated by his equal fluency in matters emotional and cerebral. Here the origins of that sustaining duality are revealed as he recounts his conscious efforts to “toughen up” and fend for himself as a boy in an unhappy Newark household. Auster nurtured himself with two great obsessions, baseball and books. He intricately chronicles his harsh awakenings to the world’s cruelty, revisits his reading passions, and offers long, enrapturing disquisitions on movies that, for him, were “blows to the head.” A cache of his old letters demolishes his tenuous memories of his student years at Columbia University during the Vietnam War protests and solitary sojourns in Maine and Paris. Closing with an “album” of historic photographs, Auster’s piquant self-portrait as a headstrong boy and “floundering boy-man” maps the “internal geography” of a hungry mind catalyzed and sustained by stories. --Donna Seaman