Paul Auster's Moon Palace

I started reading Moon Palace more then a year ago. With my life in a depressing slump, I knew that I could count on Paul Auster to provide a dose of characters who are similarly wallowing in self-pitying depression and just as full of themselves. Characters teetering on the edge of insanity though never quite outright insane, and always ending badly. In this respect, Moon Palace is no different. What Auster does with exquisite ease is to sketch out large themes into his books in a manner that is at the same time graceful, uncomplicated, but thoughtful.

Moon Palace is about the character or M.S. Fogg, an orphan that starts the book as a student in Columbia University, teetering toward personal collapse, in his mind, and then financially, and afterwards bodily also, all of it prompted by death of his only relative. While several more colourful characters are introduced throughout the book, it is all about his search for some tangible connection between his past, present, and future. All of it fragile. All of it extremely mutable. All of it dependent on accidental events in life, coincidences (some less plausible than others, alas), personal behaviour, and tendency of people to just "float" in life, rather than actively participate in it.

The surprising part is how wide the "stable state" is in life. Life most often tends to figure itself, if not for the best, at least for something livable. Disasters mitigate themselves, with or without intervention of the sufferers. Jobless people eventually find jobs, homeless people manage to eick out meager existence, but do not often starve to death. Having just watched "Touching the Void," a movie about two mountaneers who suffer a mishap on way down a mountain range in Patagonia, and survive, I was wondering how active most people would behave if circumstances hit them hard. Perhaps, it is because the ones that did not make it, go silently into the night and never make such a colourful story.

As for Auster, alas this book is more of the same for him. There is a certain kind of character novel that he does so well, but he is a hostage of his own genre. This book reminded me much of Leviathan, and somewhat of New York Trilogy. It is a nice book, which, ironically, has many book-loving and book-writing characters, many of whom live through reading or writing the books, but for Auster proper, original it ain't.