[In the following review, Walton offers tempered assessment of Mr. Vertigo, noting shortcomings in the novel's “excessive writerly knowingness.”]

As the standard government comment on the economy has demonstrated over the last three years, the fact that all the elements are in place for something does not guarantee that something will materialise. In Mr Vertigo, all the elements are in place for a fine novel.

The book's starting point, for example, is an enticing one—though admittedly the same enticing one as that of Auster's fine and recently filmed The Music of Chance. In this case the two outsiders pitched together by accident—or is it fate?—are Master Yehudi, a mysterious middle-aged Hungarian émigré and Walter Rawley, a nine-year-old ragamuffin from the streets of St Louis. The Master then takes the kid off to Kansas and teaches him to fly. Having perfect aerial ‘loft and locomotion’, Walt the Wonder Boy is—not altogether surprisingly—the sensation of the age (the 1920s) until puberty finishes his career at the end of the decade. He becomes a gangster, a second world war soldier and a figure of Fifties' domesticity, before ending up, in elegaic mood, in the present day. There is, in short, no lack of incident, and much of it is undeniably compelling. Moreover, the decades-spanning nature of the story allows Auster to add to the fictional mix some deeper reflections on The American Century. And the whole is narrated by Walt in authentic Billy Bathgate baroque, with a great villain, Uncle Slim, thrown in too. So why does the promised fine novel never materialise?

The problem is the very professionalism of the whole operation. Take the book's first sentence: ‘I was 12 years old the first time I walked on water.’ Arresting certainly, but in a self-conscious way. This sets the pattern. Too often the novel's oddness feels like a ploy—the product, not of an author who sees life as essentially strange, but of one who has decided to adopt this perspective for his own transparent literary purposes. ‘Odd’ novels work best when an internal logic dictates events; here the event always seem an authorial imposition. At one point Walt confesses: ‘I'm hard-pressed to explain how such a twisted notion wormed its way into my head.’ In fact the explanation is obvious—the notion wormed because Auster required it to do so. Similarly, because he required the young Walt to be ‘lit up with the fire of life’, Auster had earlier made his illiterate nine-year-old speak with forceful erudition. ‘The only brink I'm standing on is the brink of perdition,’ he tells the Master during a row. The same sense of contrivance, meanwhile, infects the aforementioned deeper reflections, as Walt's progress (the crashing to earth in 1929, the careers which follow) turns out to mirror that of his country rather too neatly.

Mr Vertigo is readable enough, but Auster clearly intends, and in his earlier fiction has accomplished, much more than that. This is a novel which occasionally hovers above the ground. Excessive writerly knowingness prevents it achieving genuine loft and locomotion.