Some years ago, in a burst of pre-p.c. phallocentrism, Bernard Malamud responded to an interviewer's question about the supposed death of narration by saying, “It'll be dead when the penis is.” There was a certain defensiveness in this outburst, of course. Plots, once the protein of prose fiction, had been shunned by many modern writers as if they were animal fat, a vulgar diet for the poor and unenlightened.

In recent years, however, plots have had a spectacular champion in Paul Auster, who once explained his preference for writing novels rather than plays in this way: “I wanted just narrative, telling the story … I think we absolutely depend on [stories] for our survival.” In such novels as the marvelous Moon Palace (1989) he has confected worlds of tremendous complication and bizarre plausibility.

His new work, Leviathan, contains the following account of a novel being constructed from peculiar, juxtaposed stories: “All of them are true, each is grounded in the real, and yet [he] fits them together in such a way that they become steadily more fantastic … you reach a point where you feel the whole thing begin to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon.” Though these words might serve as Auster's characterization of some of his own work, they actually belong to Leviathan's narrator, Peter Aaron, who is talking about the work of another novelist, his friend Benjamin Sachs.

Their lives have been intertwined for 15 years when Leviathan opens on July 4, 1990, with Aaron telling readers that he is sure a man who recently “blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin … sitting on the grass next to his parked car when the bomb he was building accidentally went off,” was his friend Sachs, an “exhausting” personality, a being “too large-spirited and cunning, too full of new ideas to stand in one place for very long.” A draft resister who served time in prison, Sachs created much excitement with a novel called The New Colossus and was renowned as an essayist on any number of subjects, though he was largely indifferent to “pursuing what people refer to as a ‘literary career.’”

Auster's novel, like Sachs's, is full of stories within stories, driven by a plot that is linear only in the way spaghetti is. What eventually emerges from the brilliant tangle is the story of how Sachs eventually meets his own doppelganger and becomes “a solitary speck in the American night,” removed from his wife and friends and work, “hurtling toward his destruction in a stolen car.”

In Leviathan the Statue of Liberty serves the kind of connective and causative functions that the moon did in Moon Palace. When Sachs was a little boy he visited it with his mother, who suffered a panic attack while climbing up its arm. Years later his New Colossus is “filled with references” to the Statue, and on July 4, 1986, four years before Leviathan opens, Sachs is nearly killed by falling off a fire escape during a rooftop party where guests are watching the fireworks celebration of the Statue's 100th anniversary. This ambiguous accident is the true beginning of the “waltz of disasters” in which Sachs and his friends become caught.

Sachs, we are told, is in love with ironic coincidences, and Leviathan is full of them, great and small. The largest involves the manner in which he meets the above-mentioned doppelganger. In most modern novels, plot is so subordinate to character and sensibility that reviewers needn't worry about giving anything away, but with Auster it is different, and it must suffice to say of this biggest coincidence what the narrator says of Sachs's own attitude toward it: It “was in fact a solution, an opportunity in the shape of a miracle. The essential thing was to accept the uncanniness of the event—not to deny it, but to embrace it, to breathe it into himself as a sustaining force.” This is precisely how Auster himself works his often strange material.

Leviathan's vivid pivotal characters include Maria, a demi-artist given to arbitrary projects like “following strangers around the streets, choosing someone at random when she left her house in the morning and allowing that choice to determine where she went for the rest of the day.” The novel contains occasional patches of gorgeous prose, but more often the style is deliberately spare, a stainless steel string for all the gaudy narrative beads. Aaron is supposedly writing the book over a period of two months, trying to get the whole story down from memory before an expected return visit from two FBI agents investigating the explosion in Wisconsin. The conceit proves effectively unnerving. Convinced of the urgency of Aaron's situation, the reader experiences the narration like the kind of deliberate driving that's done in a rainstorm. Leviathan ends with one “last little surprise, the ultimate twist.” As it happens, this last twist is among the less compelling ones, but readers will find that it hardly hampers the improbable fight of Auster's beautiful new balloon.