SOURCE: “Caught in the Waltz of Disasters,” in Washington Post Book World, September 6, 1992, p. 5.

In the following review, Mallon offers positive assessment of Leviathan.

Some years ago, in a burst of pre-p.c. phallocentrism, Bernard Malamud responded to an interviewer's question about the supposed death of narration by saying, “It'll be dead when the penis is.” There was a certain defensiveness in this outburst, of course. Plots, once the protein of prose fiction, had been shunned by many modern writers as if they were animal fat, a vulgar diet for the poor and unenlightened.

In recent years, however, plots have had a spectacular champion in Paul Auster, who once explained his preference for writing novels rather than plays in this way: “I wanted just narrative, telling the story … I think we absolutely depend on [stories] for our survival.” In such novels as the marvelous Moon Palace (1989) he has...