The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Paul Auster as the Wizard of Odds: "Moon Palace" by Marc Chénetier
Dennis Barone

Chénetier, Marc. Paul Auster as the Wizard of Odds: “Moon Palace.” Didier Erudition, 1996. 190 pp.

In this first full-length study of a single Auster work, Marc Chénetier argues for the centrality of Moon Palace in the author’s oeuvre. Other readers of Auster’s books might argue for the centrality of The Invention of Solitude, his first book-length prose publication, or Mr. Vertigo, his recent work, as a kind of culminating centrality with its lighter than air balance and its fall to worldliness imbalance, a plumb line for all predecessors to the claim. (Chénetier does convince me that Moon Palace can be seen as central, but he does not convince me that it necessarily is central.) Yet no matter what work one would choose for a keystone positioning, one would have to agree that Chénetier’s essay is a welcomed addition to nascent Auster criticism, especially so since it is the first to make extensive use of the Auster archive in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

Chénetier is a leading French scholar of contemporary American fiction whose book Beyond Suspicion has recently been published in English translation by the University of Pennsylvania Press. What Chénetier has to say about contemporary American fiction (he has contributed frequently to the pages of the Review of Contemporary Fiction) is always fascinating, illuminating. In his Moon Palace study he has provided what one might call a rhetoric, a poetics of the text, describing the text’s diction, narration, structure, etc., in seven descriptive chapters that could just as easily apply to or inform a reading of any other Auster writing. This is one of the values of Chénetier’s work: yet it may be seen by some as a weakness. For he all but refuses to move from identification and description to interpretation of that which he has identified, described. Indeed, he does reject such interpretation: “All of this is not what MP means, but it is part of what it manages to signify”; and “Potential conclusions to be drawn from such evidence must be left with the individual reader; the tight knot of this field of signs and images will and should be severed by no arrogant, peremptory, possibly abused critical sword.”

On the book’s penultimate page Chénetier provides one more explanation for his interpretative hesitancy (let me praise his descriptive accuracies): “Perhaps the present pages are a witness to the fact that their author, ‘having developed a true fondness’ for Paul Auster’s harmonic modes of suggestion, feels incapable of ‘delivering then with a straight,’ academic, ‘face,’ preferring to widen up the frame, open up the perspective and invite to the responsibilities of freedom, all of which attempts would be defeated by ‘final’ words.” Get busy reader and read Auster, this creator of imaginative spaces for odd things, and take Chénetier along as Baedeker. [Dennis Barone]