I’ve read two Paul Auster books in the last couple of weeks: The Brooklyn Follies and The Book of Illusions.

It’s been a while since I read Auster, and I’d forgotten what it’s like to read his works. It’s like playing cards with a known cheat. You know when you sit down with him that he’s going to be slipping cards from the deck and sliding them up his sleeve. You know that he’ll likely be talking about sliding or hiding or even cheating as he’s concealing the cards, all but announcing that he’s doing it, all but saying, “Hey, watch me slide this ace into secrecy that’s no secret at all.”

You know that as he continues playing that he’s got them up there, and when you think he’s going to pull one out, nothing happens. He makes it obvious when he’s hidden them and then slides them into play without a whisper and you only notice it a couple of hands later. And all the time he’s led you to believe you’re winning. He’s laughed off his frustrating losses, smiled at his occasional wins, but made it clear without making it clear that he knows he’s losing. Except he’s not. He’s got that one last card sure to when that one last hand when all the money’s on the table and there are twenty pages of the book left, he’ll pull that card out of your sleeve and play it himself. You look at your sleeve, look at his, and realize that all those cards he put up his sleeve were somehow a distraction for putting one ultimate winner up your sleeve.

It’s not that he creates surprise endings. The Sixth Sense is a surprise ending. No, he just gets you to look straight ahead for the entire book at some scene right in front of you and then makes you look over to your right to see what he’s been building the whole time. Subtle, deft endings that come out of nowhere and yet are no surprise at all.