SOURCE: “A Book at the End of the World: Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 62-5.

In the following essay, Washburn examines the imagery, literary and historical allusions, and narrative design employed by Auster to portray the deterioration of civilization In the Country of Last Things.

Transparent, straightforward as speech, and almost entirely innocent of the formal conundrums and cross-referenced allusions for which his New York Trilogy is noted, Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things would appear at first glance to take a sharp turn in a new literary direction. Auster's novel, like the long visionary epistle that ends Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, is written in the shape of a document cast into the void, mailed to some sort of dead letter zone at the end of the world. This, too, is a fictional...