Auster's memoir chronicles writing career

"In my late 20s and early 30s, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure." So begins "Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure," Paul Auster's newly published memoir.

As a novelist, poet, critic and translator, Auster is a man of letters par excellence. Moviegoers have also encountered his work; he wrote the screenplay for the critically acclaimed film "Smoke," and co-directed its companion film, "Blue in the Face."

With "Hand to Mouth," Auster has written about his career realistically; this memoir should be required reading for anyone hoping to follow in his footsteps. It is an autobiographical essay about the period before he found success - the 15 years when he was broke, dreaming of slipping a volume between Jane Austen's and Julian Barnes' at the local Borders.

Novelist Paul Auster describes his writing career in "Hand to Mouth."

Auster graduated from Columbia University in 1969 with one ambition - to write. But he stubbornly shunned the "double life" of the average writer, punching in at a 9-to-5 job and cramming whatever writing he could into the rest of the day. "I wanted to go out into the world and test myself, to move from this to that, to explore as much as I could."

Explore he did. Auster threw himself into a myriad of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. First, he signed on as a "utilityman" ("a combination of janitor, garbage collector, and chambermaid") on an oil tanker.

The months Auster spent at sea secured him enough cash to move to Paris, where he did everything from translating obscure poetry and art books to working the nighttime switchboard at the Paris bureau of The New York Times. And this is hardly a thorough list.

But for all of its richness, eccentric characters and strange stories, "Hand to Mouth" essentially serves as a prologue to Auster's fiction. The memoir sketches his struggles through doubt, failure and frustration, but in doing so, essentially sets the stage for his novels.

It is a book for the die-hard fan, who, after reading Auster's novels, seeks to learn something about the life that generated his work- like buying "Coda" after wearing out all the old Zeppelin albums.

But, it leaves off when things really get interesting. Auster whets our appetite only to stop abruptly in 1980, before the first of his novels was published. Readers finish the memoir wondering, "OK, so then what?"

Still, "Hand to Mouth" does excite readers' curiosity about Auster's novels, and it's often fascinating to learn about the private lives of favorite authors. Those who are new to Auster's work, and those who have enjoyed it for years, will find something to interest them in "Hand to Mouth."

11-20-97