It could be argued that, for little fault of their own, America’s great living writers are taking some harsh criticism. This month, amid eager anticipation of who would take this year’s Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy, which decides on the matter, created a buzz. Its permanent secretary launched into what may be termed an unprovoked attack on American writers. They are, said Horace Engdahl, “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture”. America does not translate enough, he explained, and the consequence is ignorance.

So, was this indication that the wise folks of Stockholm would not consider Philip Roth or John Updike, or any other of their compatriots for the honour? We’ll find out. Prizes are, in any case, overanalysed. But are America’s best novelists insular? Put that question another way, does working within one’s context imply insularity? Certainly not, if you consider the deep engagement of writers like Roth, Updike and, in this book, Paul Auster with the global developments of, let’s say to be most current, this century.

Auster is a master of the opening sentence, and so there is a reason that his publishers play them up on the jacket. This is how he begins Man in the Dark, weighing in at a slim 180 pages: “I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.”

The man who is turning the world around in his head, in more ways than are instantly revealed, is 72-year-old Anthony Brill, once a leading book critic in New York City, and now finding odd companionship with his daughter and granddaughter in quieter Vermont, all three of them coming to terms with their individual ledgers of loss and loneliness.

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