Paul Auster has produced some of the most remarkable fiction of the past decade in the New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. Those books combined a formal complexity with sheer imaginative exuberance to produce a particularly distinctive voice. High expectations indeed, then, for The Music of Chance.

It begins with ex-fireman Jim Nashe nearing the end of more than a year on the road. A $200,000 inheritance from a long-estranged father began a series of “odd conjunctions of chance”, typical of Auster. It enabled Nashe to abandon the life he knew and drift: we meet him waiting for the money to run out. Just as action becomes necessary, he meets a “wiry little runt” called Jack Pozzi who welcomes him into the “International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs”.

Impulsively, he decides to gamble his last cent on a poker game that Pozzi has arranged with two reclusive millionaires in Pennsylvania, called Flower and Stone. After testing Pozzi's integrity and ability. Nashe is convinced of success and volunteers to bankroll the game. They lose badly and, suddenly stranded, agree to work off their debt with 50 days' labour on the millionaires' estate.

Despite its familiar parameters, Chance is a departure for Auster. In contrast to his fiction imbued with urban exile, this is a “road” narrative. Much of it is told through dialogue, which proves the weakest element of the book. Unable to luxuriate in the high-minded monologue at which he excels. Auster is constrained to lower the standard of his own prose to that of Pozzi's speech. The result is a rather lightweight, but correspondingly lean, Auster.

Moon Palace finished on the road, at the end of a continent but the beginning of a new life. Nashe picks up from there, finding absolution in the pain of destroying his old life. The “bullet through his head … was not death but life”. Independence arrived in a miraculous windfall, but is lost in enslavement to Flower and Stone. Their state lottery millions enable them to indulge in various eccentricities evocative of an infantilised Bouvard and Pecuchet. In respective playrooms in their shared mansion. Stone builds a model utopia while Flower creates a museum from his collection of historical ephemera.

Nashe and Pozzi's punishment is to build a “Wailing Wall” of 10,000 stones from a ruined Irish castle. Set up in an open prison on the estate and overseen by a man called Calvin, they perform what Stone characterises as “honest work for an honest wage”. As a neat Puritanical parable takes shape, it is thwarted by Auster's restless narrative intrigue, built on the veneration of chance. An abrupt ending only adds ambivalence, though leaving a hint of respect for the ridiculous but purposive Flower and Stone.

Auster works over the language of the novel with the eyes of a poet and hands of a storyteller to produce prolonged bursts of joy. The Music of Chance sustains the brilliance of his previous writing, providing another rare experience of contemporary fiction at its most thrilling.