August 17, 2009
In his latest, Auster is in classic form, perhaps too perfectly satisfying the contention of his wearied protagonist: “there is far more poetry in the world than justice.” Adam Walker, a poetry student at Columbia in the spring of 1967, is Auster's latest everyman, revealed in four parts through the diary entries of a onetime admirer, the confessions of his once-close friend, the denials of his sister and Walker's own self-made frame. With crisp, taut prose, Auster pushes the tension and his characters' peculiar self-awareness to their limits, giving Walker a fractured, knowing quality that doesn't always hold. The best moments from Walker's disparate, disturbing coming-of-age come in lush passages detailing Walker's conflicted, incestuous love life (paramount to his “education as a human being,” but a violation of his self-made promise to live “as an ethical human being”). As the plot moves toward a Heart of Darkness–
style journey into madness, the limits of Auster's formalism become more apparent, but this study of a young poet doomed to life as a manifestation of poetry carries startling weight.