Re-reading this after 25+ years, and time has not been kind to it. It has a lovely set-up - the first sentence remains worth reading - but I remembered nothing of the book beyond actually having read it. That turns out to be because there's surprisingly little memorable here, and Auster seems so embarrassed to have come up with a cute set-up that he does everything possible to submerge it in a flood of dull navel-gazing.

What was intended at the time to look to look exploratory, an investigation of the writing of fiction and narrative, now just looks like some desperate liberal hand-wringing apologetics. Worst of all is that for all Auster's reputation at the cutting edge of '90s writing, it is all so crushingly, tiresomely conventional and conservative.