[In the following review, Edwards offers unfavorable assessment of Mr. Vertigo.]

Since the New York Trilogy in 1986, Paul Auster's style has been unmistakable: erudite, laconic, minutely responsive to changes of light and mood. Auster's characters are beset by patterns and coincidences, driven by the urge to make sense of it all and become the authors of their own lives. The attempt is foredoomed, because nothing means anything: nothing matters beyond the bare fact of survival.

Auster's protagonists carry around thousands of dollars, then spend it all, lose it, gamble it away or simply forget about it. It makes no difference. Sleep rough and spend the day watching the clouds, your life will still be as valuable—will still be the same—as it ever was. When the money's gone. Auster's heroes head off into the blue again, unencumbered, aimless and alone.

Man (sic) as bare animal, condemned to pattern-making; man in search of significance, in flight from involvement. It's a distinctive but chilly way to write, something like a cross between Beckett and Hawthorne. Auster's masterpiece, The Music of Chance, was his last unselfconscious work in this mode. In Leviathan, his next novel, we saw the protagonist, with his mythic-existential-American baggage, as others see him: self-absorbed, obsessive, unreliable, the adolescent as hero.

Mr Vertigo is something else again. In 1924, aged nine, Walt Rawley is taken into the charge of the mysterious “Master Yehudi”. A horrific apprenticeship follows, at the end of which Walt can levitate. “The Master” works out a stage act and takes Walt on tour; then, in 1929, comes adolescence and the loss of Walt's gift.

By then the book is almost over. Walt works for the Mob, runs a nightclub (“Mr Vertigo's”), gets drafted, comes home. A few pages later, it's 1993. Walt is now 78 and writing his memoirs; and yes, it's this book.

Auster has not written a historical novel, any more than Hawthorne did: stock situations are furnished with minimal background detail. Sadly, Mr Vertigo also lacks the strengths of Auster's previous work. The young Walt's dialogue is a constant outpouring of bad puns and smart answers, just the kind of linguistic jangle Auster has previously banished from his writing. What's worse, Walt tells his story straight: there are no sudden epiphanies here, no yearnings after significance.

Shorn of the intense self-consciousness of the typical Auster narrator, the book's symbolism seems laboured and arbitrary. If Walt has the same name as the founder of Virginia, so what? If Walt learns his art in the house shared with a Jew, a black and an Oglala Sioux, so what? If Walt flies through the air … well, so what? Walt's act is described without any of the numinous quality Auster has previously brought to the most mundane scenes. He might as well have been a tightrope walker. The jacket tells me that this is “a profound meditation on the nature of creativity” and that it's by the author of The New York Trilogy. One of these claims, unfortunately, is true.