SOURCE: “Postmodern Picaresque,” in The New Republic, March 27, 1989, pp. 36-40.

In the following review, Birkerts provides an overview of Auster's fiction and evaluation of Moon Palace, which he finds promising but ultimately disappointing.

Paul Auster has been, until just now, the ghost at the banquet of contemporary American letters. Though unquestionably accomplished (in the last decade he has published a memoir, five novels, several collections of poetry, and a major compendium of modern French poetry, which he edited and partly translated), he has been curiously absent from the debates being waged at the far end of the table. There are reasons for this. For one thing, his work does not fit neatly into the currently active slots. While his prose has tended toward stylistic austerity, it has little in common with the water and wafer fare beloved of the minimalists. In the same way, Auster has narrowly escaped...