Exploring the themes and narrative style of Paul Auster's Moon Palace

Introduction to moon palace

“Moon Palace” is a novel written by the American author Paul Auster and published in 1989.

It is the story of three brilliant, lonely, aching men, each in their own way and with their own madness. The three men are different from each other yet united by adventurous, erratic lives, dense of immense blows of luck and boundless tragedies.

The three men of the novel are distant, but united by chance, for a thousand amazing coincidences and as many missed opportunities.

Themes of loneliness and inadequacy

The fundamental theme of the novel is the loneliness and the sense of inadequacy: the sensation of "not fitting in", which is expressed through the tortuous path of searching for something, which could be a sense, or the way to come to terms with themselves and with the world in which it happened.
The novel recalls nineteenth-century books, with an enthralling and unexpected intertwining. The episodes are linked to each other in a fluid and easy way Auster manages to move from one story to another light years away from the previous one.

Characterization and storyline

Auster has an enviable writing ability and a strong ability to characterize characters; Auster has managed to weave a story with a continuous reference of events, in a game of mirrors and reflections, which in the end leaves, I think, a couple of solutions: either coincidences lead our lives (in spite of what a important character of the story, Tom Effing) or Auster wanted to have fun building a compelling storyline bringing it to excess, tending, however, poised between credible and incredible, and thus leaving open various ways of fruition. The sheer enjoyment of a compelling story and the ironic fun that at the end seems to envelop everything.