Who reads Paul Auster?

Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel may leave those who haven’t read his previous fourteen feeling oddly unqualified, for Invisible ideally demands a certain kind of reader: someone literary and intellectual; someone mesmerized by puzzles and Möbius strips; someone with an interest in all things Lacanian, a soupçon of Francophilia and a receptivity to High Postmodernism. Even if you don’t have these requirements, the novel offers delicate rewards, but appreciating them needs a patient willingness to inhabit what one character terms “the land of If”, a slippery world of contingency, of endless unanswerables, of missing and, yes, invisible authors of words and deeds.

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