Culture November 3, 2009

After a run of books with increasingly decrepit protagonists, Paul Auster’s 13th novel returns to a highly recognizable “young Auster” cipher and some metafictional gamesmanship. Adam Walker is a literature student at Columbia with French fluent enough to translate medieval Provençal verse. An aspiring poet, Walker is strapped for cash but avoiding his affluent parents. It’s 1967, and his college ambition, as much as anything in this impoverished period of life, is to beat the draft.