Volume 36, Number 13 · August 17, 1989
Sad Young Men
By Thomas R. Edwards
Moon Palace
by Paul Auster
Viking, 307 pp., $18.95
Closer
by Dennis Cooper
Grove Press, 131 pp., $15.95
Boomerang
by Barry Hannah
Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 150 pp., $15.95
Paul Auster's Moon Palace tells the old story—of an alienated youth struggling to understand how he may belong in a difficult time and place—with an intelligent sympathy that renews its pertinence. Marco Stanley Fogg, Auster's narrator-hero, is an orphan, a condition whose possibilities for fiction Marco himself fully appreciates. He has never known who his father was, his mother died when he was eleven, and his Uncle Victor, a musician who took care of him after that, died when Marco was an undergraduate at Columbia in the late 1960s. As his name trebly asserts, Marco is also a born traveler, someone who has to find his place in the world rather than inherit it. His fate, he bravely says as his story begins, at first seemed simply to be to 'live dangerously,' to plunge into a future that his past could not predict. But it is the past that is written largest in his account of his life between 1969 and 1972, a time that almost killed him.
Review, 3412 words
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