[(review date 22 March 1991) In the following review, Mannes-Abbott offers favorable assessment of The Music of Chance.]
Paul Auster has produced some of the most remarkable fiction of the past decade in the New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. Those books combined a formal complexity with sheer imaginative exuberance to produce a particularly distinctive voice. High expectations indeed, then, for The Music of Chance.
It begins with ex-fireman Jim Nashe nearing the end of more than a year on the road. A $200,000 inheritance from a long-estranged father began a series of "odd conjunctions of chance", typical of Auster. It enabled Nashe to abandon the life he knew and drift: we meet him waiting for the money to run out. Just as action becomes necessary, he meets a...