Bookish Brooklyn

THE narrator of Paul Auster's new novel, "Brooklyn Follies" (Holt, $24), is Nathan, a book-loving insurance salesman who moves to Brooklyn to die. Instead, he becomes rejuvenated when he runs into his nephew Tom. It's the most exuberant and plainly happy work by Auster in a long time. We met with him in his Brooklyn home, where he smoked cigarillos in a living room lined with art looking over a garden.

Why was this homegrown novel first published in the U.K. and New Zealand?

Every publisher has their rhythm, and Holt wanted to wait two years between books while other publishers wanted to go more quickly, and I couldn't really hold them back. For the next book, we're trying to coordinate it better, so that the translations come out after the original.

Rick Moody's last novel, "The Diviners," was also written in this neighborhood, and was also concerned with the same period of time as your novel - the year leading up to the election of 2000.

I know Rick, and it was a very important moment in American history, a great turning point. The last five years would not have unfolded the way they have if the election had turned out differently. It's frustrating to look back on that period and realize that we didn't fight hard enough. It continues to haunt me and it continues to haunt a lot of people. This is a great country and we're in such a mess. I do have some optimism that things will start turning; they always do.

There do seem to be a lot of New York writers in this area.

Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, invited to me come to Borough Hall and sign a copy of "The Brooklyn Follies," and one of his staff told me that this ZIP code, 11215, is home to more writers than any other in the country. When I moved to Brooklyn 25 years ago, there were no writers around. It's changed remarkably. I couldn't afford to move here now.

When did you start it?

I started writing it in 1993, and it had a different structure. It was written in the third person and there was no Nathan, but all the other characters were present. There were other characters, a homeless poet, Willie G. Christmas, and his dog, Mr. Bones. I started writing about them and decided to make a novel just about them, and that became "Timbuktu."

The book is full of anecdotes and tangential stories - you must have boxes and boxes of stories just waiting for the right moment to slot them in.

It's true, you walk around with things for decades, literally decades, knowing that it's something that's really interesting to you that deserves to be treated in some way, but you have to find the right space for it. And I get amazing letters from people, things so extraordinary you can hardly absorb it.

The book also makes you want to read all the books you mention. The way you write about Kafka and Poe and even Wittgenstein makes them all seem so relevant. The way you described Kafka, what were they?

[Pulls down the book and reads aloud] "Dora says that he wrote every sentence with excruciating attention to detail. The prose was precise, funny and absorbing."

Is it a coincidence that the cover of the book is the same shot that Harvey Keitel's character took every morning in your movie "Smoke"?

Pure chance. But this book is kind of a cousin of the movie, no question. It's set in the same neighborhood, it's about groups of people rather than a single person, and there's an optimism to it, despite all the bad things that happen. There are echoes between the two.

You've often said that writing is a vocation and not a career choice.

Why would you want to shut yourself up in a room every day of your life, trying to put words on a piece of paper, unless you really had to? There are so many more interesting things to do with your time, unless you're obsessed with writing. Whenever young people talk to me about it, I always discourage them; don't do it unless you really have to.

And how long do you spend in that room every day?

I would say six to eight hours a day working on a novel. I'm very slow. I cross out and cross out and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

And sometimes you leave that room and make movies.

I've always been a deep lover of movies, and at one point early in my life I considered being a filmmaker, but I thought that I didn't have the right personality. When I was young, I was very shy, and I thought I wouldn't be able to communicate on the set. But when I got older and less shy, I got lured out of my room to work on movies. I found that I loved it. It's healthy to get out of that room and collaborate with people every once in a while.

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