“Bloodbath Nation” is due to be published by Grove Press today in the US. The writing in this new work by Auster is terse and sombre and is accompanied by pictures taken by photographer Spencer Ostrander.
Auster says one of the reasons he is writing it is a family secret that was kept from him until he was a young man.
“The truth comes down to this: on Jan 23, 1919,” he writes in the book, “my grandmother shot and killed my grandfather.”
Auster says his father was only six years old then and his uncle, who witnessed the killing, nine.
The grandmother went on trial in Wisconsin but was found innocent for reasons of temporary insanity. She and her five children ended up settling in New Jersey, “where my father grew up in a wrecked family”.
“The Gun had caused all this, and not only did the children have no father, they lived with the knowledge that their mother had killed him,” Auster wrote.
Like gun-control advocates and victims associations before him, Auster recites the horrifying numbers associated with gun violence in America: more than 40,000 people die by gunfire each year, half of them suicides.
And guns outnumber people by 393 million to 338 million.
The book features dozens of black-and-white photos by Ostrander of the scenes of mass shootings, such as the LGBTQ nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016. More than 50 people died in that massacre.
They also show a supermarket, a temple, a parking lot, or other places but never a human being.
“I chose to focus on the site of the shooting as a symbol. Whether it’s rebuilt, whether it’s razed, whether it’s left to decay, that’s a symbol of how Americans value this issue,” Ostrander said in October in an interview with Publishers Weekly.
“The fissures in American society are steadily growing into great chasms of empty space,“ Auster writes in his book.
Marred by tragedy
The 75-year-old author with the soulful, sunken eyes gained cult status in the 1980s and 1990s with his “New York Trilogy” of metaphysical mysteries and his hip film “Smoke”, about the lost souls who patronise a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
His more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.
In recent years his life was marred by tragedy, his 10-month-old granddaughter dying after ingesting heroin and his son Daniel dying of an overdose 10 months later.
Neither of Auster’s Jewish Polish immigrant parents went to university, and there were few books in his home growing up in Newark, New Jersey.
But he discovered the power of the pen – and found his vocation – after composing a poem about the arrival of spring. It was a “horrible” poem, he admitted later, but the act of writing changed his way of seeing the world.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and, after graduating, spent four years in France, where he worked on translations to earn a living while struggling to hone his craft.
Auster went through particularly dark times in the 1970s when he married – then four years later divorced – US short-story writer Lydia Davis, with whom he had Daniel.
“I had run into a wall with my work. I was blocked and miserable, my marriage was falling apart, I had no money. I was finished,” he told the New York Times in 1992.
The turning point came with the sudden death of his father, which spurred Auster to write “The Invention of Solitude”, a haunting memoir of his dad and reflection on father-son relationships, a recurring theme in Auster’s work.
Published in 1982, it was a critical success and set Auster free with his writing. That same year he married fellow author Siri Hustvedt.
New York modernist
His big breakthrough came with “The New York Trilogy”, a philosophical twist on the detective genre featuring a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black and White.
His gift for sharp dialogue – Auster mercilessly edits himself for sentence rhythm – was key to the success of “Smoke”, which he wrote and co-directed, about a Brooklyn smoke shop owner played by Harvey Keitel.
He also co-directed the follow-up, “Blue in the Face”, which featured Keitel again, alongside Jim Jarmusch, Michael J Fox, Madonna, and Lou Reed.
In 2017 he broke with his concise style to deliver a 866-page tome, “4 3 2 1”, charting American society through the life of an everyman, Archie Ferguson.
Auster presented it as his masterwork, but while America’s National Public Radio found it “dazzling”, others were less positive, with Britain’s The Guardian calling it a “poorly edited disaster” and The Irish Times deeming it “the last fat novel of a collapsed American pride”.