SOURCE: “Unlucky Jim,” in New Statesman and Society, March 22, 1991, p. 45.

In the following review, Mannes-Abbott offers favorable assessment of The Music of Chance.

Paul Auster has produced some of the most remarkable fiction of the past decade in the New York Trilogy and Moon Palace. Those books combined a formal complexity with sheer imaginative exuberance to produce a particularly distinctive voice. High expectations indeed, then, for The Music of Chance.

It begins with ex-fireman Jim Nashe nearing the end of more than a year on the road. A $200,000 inheritance from a long-estranged father began a series of “odd conjunctions of chance”, typical of Auster. It enabled Nashe to abandon the life he knew and drift: we meet him waiting for the money to run out. Just as action becomes necessary, he meets a “wiry little runt” called Jack Pozzi who welcomes him into the “International Brotherhood of Lost...