Paul Auster's Postmodern Detective Fiction Still Matters

I SAW PAUL AUSTER in person only once. He was bending over to pick up a scrap of paper from the sidewalk on Broadway near Columbia University. He straightened, inspected the paper closely, pocketed it, and went on his way. I still don’t know whether he had dropped the scrap or had stumbled upon it. I hadn’t been paying attention to him, because I had not registered that the person I was looking at was Paul Auster, the famous American novelist and poet, widely celebrated for his work’s particular blend of European surrealism and playful American postmodernism. As soon as I did, however, I realized that he had acted the way he might have as a character in one of his own novels: mysteriously odd one moment, oddly mysterious the next. What was on that scrap of paper? If it belonged to him, why peruse it? If it didn’t, why pocket it?