We saw Paul Auster interviewed tonight as part of the City Arts & Lectures 826 Valencia Program. Auster is one of my favorite authors — very few books are as good as his Leviathan and others, from the sparse New York Trilogy to the rollicking The Book of Illusions, are also among my favorite novels. He manages to be thoughtful and entertaining at the same time and his books are all very well-crafted. I saw him in a similar interview about a decade ago and remember it as a great evening.

Not tonight. Auster was, as before, great to listen to. But the interviewer, who I won’t name, was terrible. She pitched him pointless questions with short answers (favorite type of scotch? you grew up in New Jersey?) and gave him very few opportunities to talk at length, except where she wanted him to tell stories he’s already written. And we really didn’t need to spend five minutes talking about Auster’s relationship with his assistant.

Interviewing well is hard. The point, I think, is to get the subject to express as much information as possible in a short time and to keep it focused on things that are interesting. It’s not about the interviewer, it’s about the interviewee. If you’re interviewing someone, get your ego out of the way and find ways to make your subject say things that the audience didn’t know.

Over the years, I’ve seen some wonderful interviews with City Arts & Lectures and some real clunkers. But never before has the interviewer been so bad that I was looking forward to the audience’s questions; they were a mixed bag, but almost all were better than the official questions.