Moon Palace, a strange and arresting new novel by Paul Auster, follows a flurry of outré offerings by this prolific American author. Though barely in his forties, Auster is already well known for his writings in a variety of fields—translations of Frenchmen from Mallarmé to Sartre; original poetry, including the collections Unearth (1974) and Wall Writing (1976); a poignant memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude (1982); and the recent novel In the Country of Last Things (1987). Perhaps Auster’s best-known productions, however, remain the novels of his New York Trilogy, which received considerable attention—and no small amount of critical acclaim—on their small-press publication in 1985 and 1986. Indeed, though Moon Palace is not a part of the trilogy, its thematic ties to these three novels are very strong, and a brief discussion of them may serve not only to provide some necessary background to Auster’s most recent effort but to illuminate the distinctive and ever-developing literary vision that informs all four books.

On one level, the works of the New York Trilogy may be said to fall into a category of which many of us are justifiably suspicious: they’re mysteries about Mystery, stories about Storytelling; like many a contemporary writer, Auster is hung up on the meaning of language, the enigma of naming, the philosophy of signification. The identity crisis suffered by Quinn, the mystery novelist-turned-detective who serves as the protagonist of City of Glass, is typical: Quinn (a) writes under the name of William