by Scott Bennett

Created on: January 25, 2009   Last Updated: December 31, 2009

Auster is without doubt one of the finest novelists America has produced. Moon Palace is not his most famous work but boy is it a fantastic example the scope of his achievements to date.

It takes as its focus the story of one MS Fogg and a journey of self discovery he stumbled into as a younger man. The journey through life and the maddening effect of chance within are a strong theme in Auster's work. It also tends to go hand in hand with the polar opposite concepts of the almost magically unlikely and the straight up banally believable.

Moon Palace is dominated by the hand of fate both in its effect on the main plot of Fogg's discoveries and the core question of what is a man; the product of himself or the product of random experience.

In spanning a century of US history in its stories, and touching on this great question of self determination, this work of Auster's carves its place as a great work of American literature. It manages to blend the beautifully crafted truthfulness and eye for detail found in the stories of Raymond Carver with a Post-Modern playground of stories within stories and narrators upon narrator. All this is set up to question truth and yet brings the core truths at play in the work into even greater focus.

All in all its a towering achievement; and if you're still unconvinced of that then simply read the first paragraph which I reproduce here. It recounts the whole story of the book plainly and yet the plain banal truth of the introduction simply acts as a veil for the more complex truths contained in going on the journey described. Therefore this first paragraph is to the novel what the novel is to the stories of the characters it describes a mind-bendingly fantastic work of wonder.

"It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably would have starved to death. I had met her by chance only a short time before, but eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness, a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well. I remember them as the beginning of my life."

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