Roger Phaedo had not spoken to anyone for ten years. He confined himself to his Brooklyn apartment, obsessively translating and retranslating the same short passage from Rousseau’s “Confessions.” A decade earlier, a mobster named Charlie Dark had attacked Phaedo and his wife. Phaedo was beaten to within an inch of his life; Mary was set on fire, and survived just five days in the I.C.U. By day, Phaedo translated; at night, he worked on a novel about Charlie Dark, who was never convicted. Then Phaedo drank himself senseless with Scotch. He drank to drown his sorrows, to dull his senses, to forget himself. The phone rang, but he never answered it. Sometimes, Holly Steiner, an attractive woman across the hall, would silently enter his bedroom, and expertly rouse him from his stupor. At other times, he made use of the services of Aleesha, a local hooker. Aleesha’s eyes were too hard, too cynical, and they bore the look of someone who had already seen too much. Despite that, Aleesha had an uncanny resemblance to Holly, as if she were Holly’s double. And it was Aleesha who brought Roger Phaedo back from the darkness. One afternoon, wandering naked through Phaedo’s apartment, she came upon two enormous manuscripts, neatly stacked. One was the Rousseau translation, each page covered with almost identical words; the other, the novel about Charlie Dark. She started leafing through the novel. “Charlie Dark!” she exclaimed. “I knew Charlie Dark! He was one tough cookie. That bastard was in the Paul Auster gang. I’d love to read this book, baby, but I’m always too lazy to read long books. Why don’t you read it to me?” And that is how the ten-year silence was broken. Phaedo decided to please Aleesha. He sat down, and started reading the opening paragraph of his novel, the novel you have just read.

For all the postmodern maneuvers, Auster is the least ironic of contemporary writers. Illustration by AndrÉ Carrilho

Yes, that précis is a parody of Paul Auster’s fiction, l’eau d’Auster in a sardonic sac. It is unfair, but diligently so, checking off most of his work’s familiar features. A protagonist, nearly always male, often a writer or an intellectual, lives monkishly, coddling a loss—a deceased or divorced wife, dead children, a missing brother. Violent accidents perforate the narratives, both as a means of insisting on the contingency of existence and as a means of keeping the reader reading—a woman drawn and quartered in a German concentration camp, a man beheaded in Iraq, a woman severely beaten by a man with whom she is about to have sex, a boy kept in a darkened room for nine years and periodically beaten, a woman accidentally shot in the eye, and so on. The narratives conduct themselves like realistic stories, except for a slight lack of conviction and a general B-movie atmosphere. People say things like “You’re one tough cookie, kid,” or “My pussy’s not for sale,” or “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens.” A visiting text—Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Hawthorne, Poe, Beckett—is elegantly slid into the host book. There are doubles, alter egos, doppelgängers, and appearances by a character named Paul Auster. At the end of the story, the hints that have been scattered like mouse droppings lead us to the postmodern hole in the book where the rodent got in: the revelation that some or all of what we have been reading has probably been imagined by the protagonist. Hey, Roger Phaedo invented Charlie Dark! It was all in his head.

Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model. It is 1967. Adam Walker, a young poet studying literature at Columbia, mourns the loss of his brother, Andy, who drowned in a lake ten years before the novel opens. At a party, Adam meets the flamboyant and sinister Rudolf Born, Swiss by birth, of German-speaking and French-speaking parentage. Born is a visiting professor, teaching the history of French colonial wars, about which he appears to have decided views. “War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul,” he tells a startled Adam. He tries to get Adam to sleep with his girlfriend. Later, we learn that he has worked clandestinely for the French government, and may even be a double agent.

Perhaps because Rudolf Born is so obviously a figure from spy movies—Auster could have called his novel “The Born Supremacy”—he never sounds remotely like the person he’s supposed to be, a fastidious and well-educated French-speaking European of the nineteen-sixties. He says things like “Your ass will be so cooked, you won’t be able to sit down again for the rest of your life,” or “We’re still working on the stew” (about a lamb navarin), or “All I have to do is pull it out of my pants, piss on the fire, and the problem is solved.” He takes an immediate interest in Adam, and gives him money to set up a literary magazine. “I see something in you, Walker, something I like,” he says, sounding oddly like Burt Lancaster in “Local Hero,” “and for some inexplicable reason I find myself willing to take a gamble on you.” For “some inexplicable reason,” indeed: Auster anxiously confesses his own creative lack.

This being an Auster novel, accidents visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky. One evening, while walking along Riverside Drive, Born and Walker are held up by a young black man, Cedric Williams. “The gun was pointed at us, and just like that, with a single tick of the clock, the entire universe had changed” is Walker’s banal gloss. Born refuses to hand over his wallet, draws a switchblade, and ruthlessly stabs the young man (whose gun, it turns out, was unloaded). Walker knows that he should call the police, but the next day Born sends a threatening letter: “Not a word, Walker. Remember: I still have the knife, and I’m not afraid to use it.” Full of shame, Walker goes to the authorities, but Born has left for Paris.

One might tolerate the corny Born, and his cinemaspeak, if Adam Walker, who narrates much of the novel in one way or another, were not himself such a bland and slack writer. He is supposed to be a dreamy young poet, but he’s half in love with easeful cliché. Born “was just thirty-six, but already he was a burnt-out soul, a shattered wreck of a person,” we’re told. Adam has an affair with Born’s girlfriend, but “deep down I knew it was finished.” Born was “deep in his cups by the time he poured the cognac.” “Why? I said, still reeling from the impact of Born’s astounding recitation about my family.”

Although there are things to admire in Auster’s fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute’s eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster’s previous work.) “Leviathan” (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster named Peter Aaron, who tells us about the doomed life of another writer, Benjamin Sachs. But Peter Aaron can’t be much of a writer. He describes Benjamin Sachs’s first novel like this: “It’s a whirlwind performance, a marathon sprint from the first line to the last, and whatever you might think of the book as a whole, it’s impossible not to respect the author’s energy, the sheer gutsiness of his ambitions.” Lest you are tempted to chalk all this up to an unreliable narrator—“But he’s supposed to write like that”—consider August Brill, the seventy-two-year-old literary critic who narrates Auster’s novel “Man in the Dark” (2008). Like Nathan Zuckerman in “The Ghost Writer,” he lies awake in a New England house, inventing fantastic fictions. (He imagines an alternative universe, in which America is fighting a bitter civil war over the fate of the 2000 election.) When he thinks about actual America, however, his language stiffens into boilerplate. Recalling the Newark riots of 1968, he describes a member of the New Jersey State Police, “a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission.”

Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. “Madame Bovary” actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary’s conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people’s germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it.

This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot. Nashe, in “The Music of Chance” (1990), sounds as if he had sprung from a Raymond Carver story (although Carver would have written more interesting prose):

He drove for seven straight hours, paused momentarily to fill up the tank with gas, and then continued for another six hours until exhaustion finally got the better of him. He was in north-central Wyoming by then, and dawn was just beginning to lift over the horizon. He checked into a motel, slept solidly for eight or nine hours, and then walked over to the diner next door and put away a meal of steak and eggs from the twenty-four-hour breakfast menu. By late afternoon, he was back in the car, and once again he drove clear through the night, not stopping until he had gone halfway through New Mexico.

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One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.” There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist. In “The Music of Chance,” Nashe inherits money from his father, and goes on the road. Eventually, he meets a professional poker player named Jack Pozzi (the name suggestive of “jackpot,” and also of Pozzo from “Waiting for Godot”): “It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air.” For no very credible reason, Nashe decides to tag along with Pozzi: “It was as if he finally had no part in what was about to happen to him.” The pair end up in the Pennsylvania mansion of two eccentric millionaires, Flower and Stone. Pozzi loses all Nashe’s money in a poker game, and the unfortunate duo suddenly owe ten thousand dollars to Flower and Stone, who exact repayment by putting them to work on their estate: their job will be to build, by hand, a huge wall in a field. A trailer is prepared for their quarters. The estate has become a Sisyphean prison yard for Nashe and Pozzi, with Flower and Stone as unreachable gods (Flower’s name perhaps gesturing at God’s soft side, Stone’s at punishment). Nashe gnashes his teeth in this pastoral hell.

In what is probably Auster’s best novel, “The Book of Illusions” (2002), David Zimmer, a professor of literature, holes up in Vermont, where he mourns the death of his wife and two sons in a plane crash. “For several months, I lived in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity,” he says. By chance, he sees a silent film starring Hector Mann, a brilliant actor who disappeared in 1929, and who, it was thought, never made another film. Zimmer decides to write a book about Mann, and the best part of the novel is Auster’s painstaking and vivid fictional re-creation of the career of a silent-movie actor of the nineteen-twenties. But the story soon hurtles into absurdity. After his book on Hector Mann is published, Zimmer receives a letter from Mann’s wife, Frieda: Mann is alive, though dying, in New Mexico; Zimmer must come at once. He does nothing about the letter, and one evening a strange woman named Alma arrives at Zimmer’s house. She orders him, at gunpoint, to the New Mexico ranch. Second-rate dialogue is copiously exchanged. “I’m not your friend. . . . You’re a phantom who wandered in from the night, and now I want you to go back out there and leave me alone,” Zimmer tells Alma, in one of those ritual moments of temporary resistance we know so well from bad movies. (“Well, buddy, you can count me out of this particular bank heist.”)

Alma explains to Zimmer that Hector Mann disappeared in order to hide the traces of a murder: Mann’s fiancée accidentally shot his jealous girlfriend. The rest of the book speeds along like something written by a hipper John Irving: Zimmer goes to the ranch with the mysterious Alma; meets Hector Mann, who dies almost immediately; Alma kills Hector’s wife, and then commits suicide. And at the end, making good on many helpful suggestions throughout the book, we are encouraged to believe that David Zimmer invented everything we have just read: it was the fiction he needed to raise himself from the near-death of his mourning.