Paul Auster and Don DeLillo, to whom he has dedicated his new novel, Leviathan, share more than a friendship.¹ Both have been celebrated as bleak, cerebral visionaries; both are preoccupied with the surprising patterns of connection and correspondence that underlie the world’s supposed chaos; both share a fascination with language and a penchant for name games. But there is a dramatic difference between the two. Auster is one of our finest novelists: in his most recent novels, Moon Palace (1989) and The Music of Chance (1990), he brilliantly captures the way in which life, though seemingly random, proves to be shot through with startling similitudes; in these books, truth is uncovered with difficulty and in stages, and invariably proves to be extraordinary. Yet extraordinary though it is, that truth is never quite unbelievable. Proceeding step by step from the familiar to the outlandish, Auster makes one believe even as one marvels; and he makes one feel both exhilaration and distress as his characters become gradually aware of their confinement in a prison of patterns, aware of the apparently magical bonds that underlie their key relationships and that have covertly predetermined their major decisions.

Auster’s vision is of a world penetrated by coincidence, a world where chance occurrences can change a life, a world where everyone—even the most solitary of individuals—is in reality an unknowing element of some overarching design. If in his early novels Auster conveys this vision in ways that often seem contrived and pretentious,