SOURCE: “The Strange Case of Paul Auster,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 53-61.

In the following essay, Lewis examines the narrative and thematic characteristics of Auster's “anti-detective” fiction and the elusive authorial presence of Auster.

The mystery is this: How can we best classify the works of Paul Auster? Exhibit 1 is a statement he makes about one of his characters: “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories.”¹ Auster's fictional world is an austere one, composed of reconfigured plots and reworked motifs drawn from the history of American literature and his own back catalog, and this makes it difficult to untangle the many different intertextual threads which stitch his stories together. One consistent theme is that of the detective's search for a missing person, so in this inspection I too shall...