[In the following review, Dirda offers positive assessment of Moon Palace.]

Hemingway once remarked that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” That story of a boy's passage toward maturity, told against the astounding dreamscape of America, has since been repeated in the adventures of Nick Carraway, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and countless others. Moon Palace, which relates the growing up of Marco Stanley Fogg, shows that there's a dance in the old theme yet, especially when a brilliant writer takes the floor.

After working for many years as a translator of modern French poetry, Paul Auster rocketed into semi-celebrity with the publication of his New York trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room.

The first of these novels played with the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story, as a mystery writer finds himself impersonating a private eye in order to help a beautiful dark-haired woman. The second, displaying a more austere Auster, worked a series of Beckett-like permutations on the relationship between observer and observed: a p.i. named Blue spends years shadowing a character named Black. The concluding volume of the trilogy took up the modernist conceit of a shamus-like biographer compelled to learn the truth about a writer, no matter what the personal costs.

Chock-a-block with arcana about language, responsibility and identity, the novels might have been nothing more than a high-brow snooze were it not for their author's commanding narrative skills. For all his post-modern reflexivity, Auster is a masterly, often autobiographical, storyteller, one whose voice—unruffled, meditative, intelligent—quickly snares a reader. His memoir, The Invention of Solitude, points up the personal element in much of his writing—from the recurrent obsession with fathers and sons to details about life in Paris and his characters' refined taste in reading. Anyone who likes, say, the philosophical melodramas of Robertson Davies, the melancholy comedies of Russell Hoban or the intellectual fantasies of John Crowley should try Auster. He's of their company.

His latest book, Moon Palace, divides roughly into three main sections. In the first we meet the hero, Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan—named after three explorers—who has just enough money to finish Columbia University. But, “like all the Foggs, he had a penchant for aimlessness and reverie, for sudden bolts and lengthy torpors.” Acting purely out of a kind of existential obstinacy, M.S., as he likes to be called, ends up starving on the street, dimly surviving as a wanderer in Central Park, living on discarded food and sleeping under bushes.

Eventually, though, he is rescued by his old roommate Zimmer and a future girlfriend named Kitty Wu. They nurse him back to health, at which point he finds a job as a companion to a wealthy old man, Thomas Effing. Nearly 90, blind, confined to a wheelchair, the cantankerous Effing is a blend of magus, Ancient Mariner and the invalid Gen. Sternwood of The Big Sleep. In a thrilling flashback, lasting nearly a third of Moon Palace, he recounts his life from his youthful admiration for the inventor Nikola Tesla and his passion for the paintings of Ralph Albert Blakelock through his disorienting adventures in the Utah desert.

By the time we reach these last, “his narrative,” remarks Fogg, “had taken on a phantasmagoric quality … and there were times when he did not seem to be remembering the outward facts of his life so much as inventing a parable to explain its inner meanings.”

Actually all of Moon Palace shares this same phantasmagoric quality, this skirting around the edges of the uncanny, this sense of “subterranean vision.”

Where did Effing get his money? How can he predict the exact date of his own death? Why is he excessively thin, while his neglected son is exceedingly obese? The book shimmers with such mysteries, thematic echoes, outrageous coincidences, as well as artfully timed revelations. All three main characters, classic American loners, suffer the same pattern of madness. Allusions to the moon abound, largely as an emblem of man's deepest or most extreme desires. Unexpected paternity plays a major role, as do unwanted babies. By his story's end, the genial and likeable Fogg also manages—indirectly—to kill his grandfather, father and child.

Partly to counter these Jacobean excesses Auster chooses to have Fogg tell his tale in a voice like twilight, serene, after the fact, almost resigned. All of Auster's books follow this pattern of the French recit, short, introspective narratives, relying on telling as much as showing, keeping dialogue to a minimum. The effect is to grant this, and Auster's other novels, an air of wistfulness and a certain calm plausibility: I was there, I suffered, I am the man.

Auster also enjoys following a seemly, straightforward narrative line, until everything starts to get tied up, at which point he will let the story go slack, twist and loop back on itself. In Moon Palace the last third of the book introduces a new character, an historian named Solomon Barber, who “was born of a madwoman and a ghost.” Naturally Barber holds the keys to several mysteries—not all of which are resolved before our hero stands, at the novel's soulful but happy end, on a California beach and stares up at the moon rising above the dark Pacific.

At one point, Fogg mentions the writing habits of his friend Zimmer, habits which clearly apply to his creator as well: “Zimmer's chief concern in life was writing … and he spent long, hard hours at it, laboring over each word as if the fate of the world hung in the balance—which is surely the only sensible way to go about it.”

If the result is a book as fine as Moon Palace, then it is unquestionably the only sensible way of going about it.