Siri Hustvedt : 'Cézanne wanted the world naked, but it never is naked'

Her fiction explores love in a cold climate. And Siri Hustvedt paints a discreet portrait of her own famous literary marriage. James Urquhart warms to her in an icy Paris

Siri Hustvedt's eyes are sparkling. She's delighted to be back in Paris again, a city that she loves, and promoting her breathtaking new novel What I Loved (Sceptre, £14.99). And Paris is literally breathtaking, at a hoary seven degrees below. Being British, I am obliged to mention the cold but Hustvedt, elegant in dark suit and court shoes, cheerily harrumphs this away, as any hardened Minnesotan might. Gliding through the frozen city towards our Left-Bank hotel rendezvous, I had been dreaming up ice-breakers. I had decided to borrow a habit from Paris, the sly art critic in her debut novel The Blindfold, who startles people by asking for any idiosyncrasies that might offer glimpses into their personalities.

I was angling for a predilection for something quirkily Minnesotan, but Hustvedt's response is considered and literary, taking us straight to the acute sense of loss that pervades her new work. "Objects return," she confesses. "There's a peculiar relation of objects to death and dying that I do not notice at the time of writing." Artefacts in some way obsess characters in all three of Hustvedt's novels. In What I Loved, the narrator Leo has a drawer of keepsakes (including his wife's sock, a pocket knife, a charred packet and one of his son's sketches) which poignantly represent persons or actions, but which resonate with different meanings according to their mutual locations within the drawer.

"There are many possible ways to tell this same story," she continues. "When Leo plays the game of rearranging the objects in his drawer, it's almost as though he's creating alternative narratives through association. Memory is like a narrative itself, and not always a true narrative. We edit memory through language ... At the end of the book, Leo's reflection on the characters he has loved but who have largely disappeared from his life is a bit like Dürer's rhino – a recognisable but inaccurate creature pieced together from recollection and hearsay."

An old man with fogging eyesight, Leo narrates What I Loved, recalling his exhilarating marriage to Erica and the early years of their beloved, articulate son, Matt; their firm friendship with Bill, an artist, and his partner Violet, a voluptuous model who writes academic papers on hysteria. The vibrant warmth of these interlocked families is cooled by two shocking deaths and the crushing delinquency of Bill's son, Mark. What I Loved is Leo's testament to people who struggled to know and love each other, but who are left with a sense of absence.

"I have written about their happinesses but no, What I Loved is, in the end, a book about loss. But it is impossible to know another person absolutely," she states emphatically. "I feel that mystery all the time, but it's neither sad nor depressing to me. On some level, I find it rather invigorating. Once you accept it, it makes for a rather exciting ride. Failing relations between people is often to do with a false kind of intimacy in people who imagine they can know or predict anything about a person. It's terrible – like this grim culture of confessing everything on television. Maybe this is my Scandinavian background coming out?" She restrains herself briefly, then announces: "Withholding is sometimes the most moral position we can take."

Wait a minute. Bill struggles to connect with his family. Lucille, Bill's first wife, withholds so much that she seems to Violet "all boarded up and shut down like a condemned house". "Missing Men", Bill's sequence of portraits of his father Sy, facing away from the viewer, suggests a seriously misfired paternal relationship. We can agree that confessional television is grim, but is withholding really the answer?

Hustvedt is quick to point to the passion counterbalancing these mournful relationships. "Violet and Bill misfire to a much lesser degree than Bill and his father. There is something hidden in Bill, hidden even from himself, but their marriage is a real love relationship. Part of the eroticism for Violet is that she just can't quite get him." Erotic is true. What I Loved is sexy in the intensity of its feeling rather than titillating with detail, which invites an obvious question about Hustvedt's marriage to the writer Paul Auster.

"The marriage between Violet and Bill is to some extent based on my marriage," she agrees. "You always use your own experience. Paul was, without question, the impetus for Bill; he has Paul's body and some of his characteristics." Passionate, cigar-smoking, brooding, vigorous, lustful, responsible, moral and uncompromising: Auster must be feeling pretty good about What I Loved, especially since he read the four complete drafts of this novel over the six years that it took to write.

His writing, as well as his being, has percolated into his wife's fiction. The Blindfold bears strong resemblances to Auster's pared-down early novels of New York City; The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, set in a fictional version of Hustvedt's home town, opens cinematically with Lily spying on (and then stripping for, to catch his attention) an artist in the opposite flat. When pressed, Hustvedt admits that it has connections to Auster's Ghosts.

Her new novel continues the compliment. "In quite a subtle way, some of the artworks that I invented for Bill share characteristics with Paul's writing. There is an hommage to City of Glass and the hunger theme in Bill's art recalls Moon Palace. But this isn't deliberate cleverness; having lived with a person for 20 years and internalised that experience, some of the thematic information that has become a part of my make-up inevitably feeds my own invention."

Auster's cipher-like qualities emerge in Bill's aesthetic vision: "Cézanne wanted the world naked, but the world is never naked. In my work, I want to create doubt." Yet Hustvedt confirms how ardently each is pursuing intimacy: "They're really trying to tell each other the truth. Sometimes they slip up, or withhold information, but essentially they are engaged in genuine exchange." This tension between uncertainty and intimacy creates the attractive paradox at the heart of What I Loved as each personality yields an essential ambiguity that resists admission.

Hustvedt is enthusiastic about ambiguity and is happy that the creation of uncertainty seems to be a part, perhaps an unconscious part, of her writing. In both of her earlier works, key actions are prompted by piecemeal reportage and hearsay filtering back to worry at the narrator, who has difficulty in grasping a clear picture. Leo's recollection uses this incremental learning about all those he has loved, but mislaid after years of closeness. Bill's portraits bring this home graphically. Despite their congested collage of artefacts, Leo's abiding impression is of a blankness at the core.

"There's a certain amount of flux and plurality in all of us," Hustvedt suggests, "more so in some, such as Mark, than in more grounded characters like Leo or Bill." Mark grows up in the shuttle of divorce and gradually begins to exhibit audacious mendacity, as well as addictive and hysterical tendencies. "I did a lot of research into psychopathic personalities," Hustvedt explains, referring to one academic who summarised the outrageous antics of patients. "If you can read it with distance, it's almost a comedy – but if you were close to someone like that, could you imagine how lying all the time really prevents the possibility of meaningful dialogue?"

Mark's is only an extreme example of a long line of transgressive behaviours on Hustvedt's pages. Transvestism is another theme that returns. Mark dresses his body and personality according to how he wishes to be perceived, but Iris spent large parts of The Blindfold tramping the streets in a suit, answering to "Klaus". With Leo, Hustvedt is indulging herself more directly. "This is the ultimate in transvestism," she announces loudly in our small hotel parlour. "Having a man's voice just takes it one step further, but I definitely enjoyed Iris's transvestism and it's definitely a fantasy of mine."

Left-Bank Paris would probably have applauded such an admission. But with such forthright enthusiasm, one could hardly call it an idiosyncrasy.

SIRI HUSTVEDT, BIOGRAPHY

Siri Hustvedt was born in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1955. Her mother – and her mother tongue – is Norwegian. Her father is a professor of Norwegian language at St Olaf College, where she studied history. In 1978 she attended Columbia University's graduate school; her thesis examined language and identity in Charles Dickens. She wrote poetry, and met Paul Auster in 1981; they married in 1982. They live in Brooklyn with their daughter Sophie, born in 1987. She followed her first novel The Blindfold, in 1992, with The Enchantment of Lily Dahl. In 1998 she published Yonder, a book of art criticism that includes essays on still life and Vermeer. Her third novel, What I Loved, published this week by Sceptre, is set in New York City. Siri Hustvedt is continuing to write and teach about art, and gearing up for another novel.