I get confused about chapter books, I think it’s meant to be just another term for a book that’s too short. But in 2003, Paul Auster wrote a full-length novel called Oracle Night, and it is one chapter long. The paperback edition is 256 pages long, but it is a single chapter.

And I cannot comprehend how I am sure that is part of what makes the novel so — I want to say compelling, but that’s not a strong enough word. Gripping doesn’t cut it either. Grasping, maybe. It grasps you, shakes you about a bit, then chucks you aside at the end.

Maybe it’s just because I’m so used to thinking that I’ll read to the end of this chapter before I go to sleep, and then found there wasn’t a next chapter coming up in a few pages.

Last month saw the end of a chapter in another sense, as Auster died, aged 77. There won’t be any more grasping novels.

Except there will for me. Because I was agog over Paul Auster’s writing right up through 1992 and the tremendous Leviathan. The book before that, The Music of Chance, initially bored me but then I was on a train, I had nothing else to read, and the next thing I know I’m about to miss my stop because it shifts from boring to grasping. So there was that, then after it Leviathan, and before it both Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. All favourites.

But in 1994 there was Mr Vertigo and in 1999 there was Timbuktu. It seemed to me at the time that he’d fallen off a bit, so I fell off too. I said Oracle Night was in 2003 but I don’t think that’s when I read it. I don’t think I read his 2002 novel The Book of Illusions on publication either, but I’ve read it since. I’ve read it several times since. Auster was back, I thought, and so I eventually carried on buying the novels.

Yet for some reason, I didn’t read them. So right now on my shelves I have six of his novels and I just learned that I’d missed the latest one — the last one — that came out in 2023.

There’s a decent chance, then, that I have seven superb novels to read even though the writer is gone. I have no expectations of being remembered when I’ve left a room, let alone died, but the fact that a writer’s work can continue after them is a pleasure. The writing becomes separated from the writer.

Although maybe writer and writing are always separated in at least some way. Because many years ago now, I was at UCLA doing research for a book project and it turned out that I had arrived the morning after Paul Auster had given a talk there. I told the staff how sorry I was to miss him, but I can see both of them now, gently shaking their heads and saying no.

They had both found him to be an arse.

Maybe he was, maybe it was them, maybe I’m remembering this wrong after god knows how many years it is. But you can think of other examples where this kind of thing was true, or is true. I cherish the fact that Alan Plater once described a novel of mine as being worthy of Patricia Highsmith, for instance, even after I then looked her up and learned about her politics.

I cherish the fact that Kate Bush said recently that no, she wasn’t a Tory, she’d been misquoted. And there’s that Wagner fella, let’s not forget him. Or at least, let’s forget him and remember only his music.

I’ve met writers I admire who turn out to be superb human beings. But I’ve been trying to be a superb human being all my life. Maybe for the sake of my writing, I should become an arse.

You may feel I’m already well on the way, but I’m considering putting some effort into it now.