When Paul Auster started publishing his New York City trilogy in the 1980s, he occupied a then-unusual space in American literature. An austere artist of deeply European instincts and a suspicion of the big gesture, he didn’t have the blustering hurly-burly of the 1970s crowd (your Mailers, Bellows, and Roths) and seemed to chart a new way forward that was cool in temperament like the New Wavers (Ellis, McInerney) but more finely chiseled.

When he passed away this week, Auster was beautifully eulogized by many, including Lucy Sante, who came up with one of the more moving renderings of

His paragraphs were a moving sidewalk — it was more comfortable to ride than to hop off — so you could read him for hours, as his plots twisted and turned…

There was a kind of fatalism to Auster’s work that called to mind the French writers whose spirit he inhabited (perhaps even more so, those adopted by France like Samuel Beckett). You can see it here, in a piece of advice for writers with ambitions:

You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time…