Sad to see him go.
Picking up his books again as an adult only took away the magic in some of his weaker works.
Mostly, the magic remained.
The guys learning to play Bach and building a wall, the delirant anon in NYC chasing paper trails, the adolescent boy learning to levitate... the evil man offering glasses in a post-apocalyptic city:
so many memories remain, I don't know much about Paul Auster but I can say he was an influence on my life. Because of randomness (a relative picking Mr Vertigo as a present for me, probably because of book-store recommendations)
Paul Auster's characters always appear as somewhat mythical, living through a personal transformation.
Many of his characters have an aura of NYC artist/cultural authority stick around then, but it does not bother me at all.
Like many of my favorite authors, he injects much of his own personality into the main characters, even with multiple books using a novelist/writer as the main character.