Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace", who to Wood "have all employed and impaled cliché in their work", where Auster, who "clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness- hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue", "does nothing with cliché except use it". Considering this "bewildering", Wood opines that "Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist", going on to question "is he a postmodernist at all?", observing that "Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot". Wood however noted that "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called "all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller." There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along." He stated that "The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist." Wood also bemoaned Auster's 'b-movie dialogue', 'absurdity', 'shallow skepticism', 'fake realism' and 'balsa-wood backstories'. Personal life Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster, who was arrested on April 16, 2022, and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month old infant daughter, who consumed heroin and fentanyl he was using. On April 26, 2022, Daniel, who was found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia, died from an overdose. Daniel was also known for his association with the Club Kids and their ringleader Michael Alig, and was present during the killing of fellow Club Kid Andre Melendez. Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. He has said his politics are "far to the left of the Democratic Party" but that he votes Democratic because he doubts a socialist candidate could win. He has described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists" and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've