Book Review: New in Print

Invisible

by Paul Auster
Henry Holt and Co., 320 pp., $25

It should come as no surprise that the author of labyrinthine novels such as City of Glass and Moon Palace would center his latest work around a character who bears a striking resemblance to Paul Auster himself.

Both Auster and his lead, Adam Walker, attended Columbia University in the late Sixties before moving to Paris. Thus starts the meta-shenanigans that are kept largely at bay for the first section of the novel, which tells the engrossing story of a college sophomore whose sin of vanity in trying to impress Rudolf Born, an older man of unquestionable intelligence but questionable character, begins a ripple effect that forms increasingly larger circles through the rest of the novel. Even as Auster switches from first-person to third-person narration, he thankfully doesn't let the plot turn into a parlor trick or afterthought. Parts of the story are even told in the rarely used second person, making it read like a degenerate's self-help book. "Degenerate" is not to say the prose is lackluster (the majority of it shines), but "you" are implicated in the most uncomfortable and taboo passages of the book – an effect that is both intriguing and unnerving.

After retiring to the more comfortable third person, the action moves to France, where Walker falls in with the same crowd that caused him all the trouble in New York, only now he has vengeance on the brain. From there the perspective swings back to first person but with a new narrator. After that, keeping track of whose perspective on the action we're reading gets obscured by a postmodern fog. Luckily, Auster has bided his time well and sucked the reader into the story before playing his many untrustworthy-narrator cards.

Auster is at his best when he finds a balance between suspenseful plot elements and jarring antics with the written word. That fine line is handled expertly through much of the novel, stumbling a few times in the third person as the language will suddenly turn flowery to no end other than to stick out like a sore thumb – a mistake that is easy to make when you're juggling the dense themes and ideas that Auster otherwise handles like the seasoned pro that he is.