March 19, 1989

The Remarkable Journey of Marco Stanley Fogg

By JOYCE REISER KORNBLATT

MOON PALACE

By Paul Auster.



n somber, cerebral and terse narratives, Paul Auster has hunted down his obsessions. The missing father, the limits of language, the past as a crime we are driven to solve: from these themes, Mr. Auster has built a reputation as a post-modern gumshoe, fusing the conventions of detective fiction with Beckett-like despair.

Now comes ''Moon Palace,'' a novel that chides the reader - and reviewer - who might have assumed that all Mr. Auster's brief and elliptical meditations on loss would surely lead to yet one more. Hadn't we cracked the Auster esthetic by now? Couldn't we predict, after all these quiet volumes, still another spare metaphysical puzzler with little, if any, big-screen (or mini-series) potential? ''Moon Palace'' plays with recognizably Auster concerns - lost fathers abound, the narrative investigates itself, psyches collapse and, repeatedly, life reveals itself to be ''a series of lost chances.'' But there is nothing quiet about this story, or spare, or restrained. And although the book chronicles innumerable tragedies, it is, in manner and vision, a comic novel. How could a narrator named Marco Stanley Fogg not be funny?

''It was the summer that men first walked on the moon,'' Marco begins, and we are off on a series of picaresque adventures that borrow quite openly from those very literary traditions that have seemed most alien to Paul Auster's imagination. Of course Marco is an orphan; his mother dies at 29, his father is a mystery of whom not even a picture remains, and Fogg (Fogelman, actually, before an Ellis Island clerk truncates the family name) grows up with his Uncle Victor, a hapless itinerant clarinetist who leaves Marco his personal library of a thousand books. For a time, the unopened cartons serve as furniture for our impoverished student-hero; then he reads his way through them, sells them and, finally destitute, lives for awhile in Central Park, encounters as many miracles as depravities there, survives for a time in a cave and is finally rescued by his friend Zimmer and Kitty Wu, a young Chinese dancer with whom he falls in love.

This is just the beginning, of course. Mr. Auster invents an aging rich man named Thomas Effing, who hires Marco Fogg as his companion and becomes Marco's wacky spiritual guide, tormentor and benefactor. Effing tells his own story at length (Marco writes it down as the old man dictates) so that his narrative functions as a kind of tale within the tale, its meanings opening up to us as Marco's own saga progresses. Effing claims to have been a somewhat famous painter who, after a series of mishaps, tragedies and debacles, makes a journey on foot through the transforming landscape of the American Southwest - ''the land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up'' - and survives, half mad, in a cave he fills with paintings. ''He untaught himself the rules he had learned, trusting in the landscape as an equal partner, voluntarily abandoning his intentions to the assaults of chance, of spontaneity, the onrush of brute particulars. He was no longer afraid of the emptiness around him.''

In this way Mr. Auster works the mythology of the American West into ''Moon Palace,'' its beauty and violence and Indian mysticism a counterpoint to the gritty New York terrain the rest of the novel details. And it is no surprise that the final leg of Marco Fogg's odyssey takes our hero himself to that primal landscape. But not before he discovers the shocking truth about Effing's long-lost son, Solomon Barber, an obese itinerant history professor (and of course his scholarly focus is the American West) who has also written a kind of futuristic pulp western, which we hear about at some length. In a moment of rage, Marco attacks Solomon Barber, his dear friend seemingly turned traitor, and the larger-than-life father figure falls, fatally injured, into a freshly dug double grave, feet away from Marco's own beloved mother's grave, which Marco has taken Barber to visit on their journey west.

With Effing and Barber dead and Marco's relationship with Kitty Wu ruined by the abortion she insists she needs and Marco cannot accept, the novel comes full circle: Marco Stanley Fogg is alone again, orphaned many times over, destitute, lost this time not in Central Park but in that place in the world most like the moon, the American Southwest. For four months he wanders - ''For the first two weeks, I was like someone who had been struck by lightning. I thundered inside myself, I wept, I howled like a madman, but then, little by little, the anger seemed to burn itself out, and I settled into the rhythm of my steps.'' Like many proper archetypal American heroes, Marco ends his quest in California, in Laguna Beach. ''This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins.''

''Moon Palace'' (the title refers to a Chinese restaurant in New York) is held together by unlikely coincidences. All the characters are eccentrics who border on caricature, yet their struggles are heartfelt and complex. The plot of the novel is so unbelievable, its narrator often has trouble being convinced by it himself. And the motifs are extremely familiar: the beleaguered orphan, the missing father, the doomed romance, the squandered fortune, the totemic power of the West, the journey as initiation. Yet the story is, finally, so goodhearted and hopeful, so verbally exuberant, that its obvious architecture, its shameless borrowings, may be forgivable.

I wondered: was this an early novel that Paul Auster reworked, in hopes of a wider audience, after his years as an experimental and elusive stylist? Or is ''Moon Palace'' a determined retreat from the growing darkness of his own prior work, of which he writes in his moving memoir about fatherhood, ''The Invention of Solitude'': ''In that the world is monstrous. In that it seems to offer no hope of a future, A. looks at his son and realizes he must not allow himself to despair. There is this responsibility for a young life, and in that he has brought this life into being, he must not despair.''

Joyce Reiser Kornblatt teaches writing and literature at the University of Maryland. Her most recent novel is ''Breaking Bread.''

THE NOVELIST OUT OF CONTROL

When he starts to write a novel, Paul Auster said, ''I begin with a personality, rather than an idea. And the person becomes very real to me. It's almost as though I give myself up and enter into that other consciousness.''

The process is not as impulsive as it is reckless. ''It's a funny thing,'' Mr. Auster said, ''but I'm not actually in control of what I'm doing. I think a lot of writers feel this way.'' He was talking on the telephone from the Brooklyn studio - he doesn't work at home - where he wrote ''Moon Palace,'' his fifth novel.

''The story and the characters become so real,'' he said, ''that they lead you along. It's a matter of following them correctly and not pushing them off the track.''

But even the surest of foot, of course, cannot always stay the course. ''Early on in every project I've gone off track and had to throw away six, eight months' work,'' Mr. Auster said. ''There is an idea that's shining through all the material somehow, and the obligation is to find that core and stick to it.''

Mr. Auster, who is 42 years old, said that it took a long time for him to find the idea that, quite literally, shines through ''Moon Palace.'' (The book takes its name from a Chinese restaurant - and its bright neon sign - on Broadway near the campus of Columbia University.) ''This novel was knocking around in my head for many years before I actually sat down and wrote it,'' he said. ''Then the sign came in at a certain point and was a way of crystallizing all the images and unifying the book for me.''

''In some sense, this is my first novel, but I wrote it later,'' Mr. Auster continued. ''And now I'm working on something else as hard as I can to try to keep my mind off the publication of it.''

In his new novel, Mr. Auster said, he probably will once again touch upon many of the themes that appear in his earlier works, such as solitude and the search for a father. ''I think it's simply that one's inner life burns with the same problems all the time. You never get rid of them,'' he said. ''I try to be as different as I can in each book, but of course I keep discovering myself. I have no choice in the matter.''

-- MICHAEL FREITAG