Auster’s prose is powerful, precise and elegant; his characters are perfectly outlined and make themselves understandable and believable; there is also a strong and original story to be told, which Auster skilfully implements. There is not any doubt this is a remarkable book altogether.
This is a novel about friendship and love focussing, though, in their unavoidable counterpoint: pain and solitude. Fogg, the main character, loses his mother, his uncle, his lover, his unborn son and his finally found father. Effing, the old man in the wheelchair, decides to kill himself in the desert just to avoid the suffering of his former existence. Kitty suffers so much when her lover and friend parts company with her that decides not to let him come back when begged to, knowing she would not be able to cope with another rupture any more. Barber loses her lover the very night he gets her pregnant, and his whole life is a perpetual mourning of that disrupted relation. Only death, real or feigned, seems to offer the comfort that life is reluctant to give. This may be not a much optimistic proposal, but undoubtedly is a convincing literary approach that Auster masterfully develops, just to tell us that being loved is the only way to be alive.