SOURCE: “Facing Fearful Odds,” in The Spectator, April 9, 1994, pp. 28-9.

In the following review, Walton offers tempered assessment of Mr. Vertigo, noting shortcomings in the novel's “excessive writerly knowingness.”

As the standard government comment on the economy has demonstrated over the last three years, the fact that all the elements are in place for something does not guarantee that something will materialise. In Mr Vertigo, all the elements are in place for a fine novel.

The book's starting point, for example, is an enticing one—though admittedly the same enticing one as that of Auster's fine and recently filmed The Music of Chance. In this case the two outsiders pitched together by accident—or is it fate?—are Master Yehudi, a mysterious middle-aged Hungarian émigré and Walter Rawley, a nine-year-old ragamuffin from the streets of St Louis. The Master then takes the kid off to Kansas and teaches...