Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
Enigma Variations
By Robert Towers
The Music of Chance
by Paul Auster
Viking, 217 pp., $18.95
East Is East
by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking, 364 pp., $19.95
Traffic and Laughter
by Ted Mooney
Knopf, 402 pp., $19.95
Paul Auster is one of those protean novelists who cannot be identified with a recognizable voice or predictable range of subject. There are however common characteristics in his six novels: a fondness for enigmatic situations, a fascination with the ways that chance and destiny may seem to intersect, and an indulgence in symbolism that calls frequent attention to itself but is likely to remain opaque. In the three novels (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room) that make up his so-called New York trilogy, Auster undertakes a kind of structuralist approach to the detective novel: with the crime left vague and the characters and situations enigmatic, he plays with the conventions of the genre in a rather dry and abstract fashion.
Review, 3370 words
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