[In the following review, Mundy offers unfavorable assessment of Hand to Mouth.]

“We're talking about your life,” proclaims a character in Paul Auster's first novel, Squeeze Play. “There's nothing more important than that.”

Hand to Mouth left me with the uneasy feeling that it would have been more enjoyable if I'd shared the speaker's selfless priorities. The book is outwardly about Auster's attempts to become a writer and the travails he suffered in realising this cherished ambition. It concludes with three huge appendices: the first reproduces three sub-Beckettian dramas written by the young Auster; the second comprises colour plates of a card game that he was unable to exploit commercially; the third gives us Squeeze Play, a modestly impressive hard-boiled detective novel. After The Red Notebook and Groundwork, this is Auster's third consecutive collection of his juvenilia.

Indeed it is so crammed with traces of what is to come that at times it reads like an Ur-text for dedicated Auster fans: we learn that the man who blew himself up on the first page of Leviathan resembles Auster's college friend, Ted Gold, who destroyed himself with a home-made bomb; Casey and Teddy, two eloquent tatterdemalions Auster encounters while working in a hotel, remind us of Stone and Flower, the lottery-winning poker players in The Music of Chance; and Quinn, the metaphysical detective in The New York Trilogy, is revealed here to be Auster's alter ego, a pseudonym used for his early articles. I could go on.

In the enigmatic worlds evoked by the novels, characters strive to understand what is happening to them, slowly building up understanding piece by piece, as one would a mosaic. Each snatched fragment of conversation, each serendipitous moment is slotted carefully into place in the hope that an overall pattern will emerge. Usually something then happens that undercuts all that the character thinks is true. At times in this book I felt like one of Auster's characters. Reading it has caused something to crash, rock-like, into my admiration of his writing. Indeed, Hand to Mouth made me wonder what exactly has been quite so pleasing about Auster's work all these years.

His writing seems to have an easy intimacy with the reader—the lightness of tone, the beautifully weighted prose, a sense of relaxed familiarity—but scratch the surface and it reveals itself as rather po-faced and self-important. This book is really not about writing at all but about the mythic status of the writer. Throughout, Auster persistently neglects to connect his attempts to be an artist with the romantic myth of how an American author learns his craft: he goes to live and write in Paris, but doesn't mention the illustrious American literary figures who had done so before him; he goes to sea, like Melville, Poe and, if legend be believed, Pynchon, and yet makes no mention of how often this has served as a literary rite of passage.

Hand to Mouth causes us to reassess the opacity of the previous books. What is enigmatic is its very pointlessness, which leaves one marvelling how such an accomplished writer can be reduced to plundering, yet again, the notebooks in his bottom drawer. The terrible sense at the end is that Auster has run out of things to say and is more interested, for the time being at least, in the type of immortality that comes from giving undergraduates a corpus of work to dissect.