Books of The Times; A Picaresque Search for Father and for Self
Date: March 7, 1989, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition Section C; Page 19, Column 1; Cultural Desk Byline: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Lead: Moon Palace By Paul Auster 307 pages. Viking. $18.95.
In an idiosyncratic memoir (''The Invention of Solitude''), published in 1983, Paul Auster probed his relationship with his late father, and he established the themes that would later animate his fiction: paternity and its effect on a child's sense of self; the consequences of solitude; the limitations of language, and the roles of randomness and causality in the world. His acclaimed ''New York Trilogy'' (''City of Glass,'' ''Ghosts'' and ''The Locked Room'') turned the detective story into an instrument for examining these philosophical issues - in much the same way as his last novel (''In the Country of Last Things'') used the conventions of the science-fiction thriller for similar meditations.
This time, in ''Moon Palace,'' Mr. Auster employs the form of the picaresque adventure to create a sad-funny tale of coming of age. The setting, for the most part, is Manhattan; the time, the 60's and early 70's; the protagonist, a Columbia undergraduate with the faintly absurd name of Marco Stanley Fogg.
Yet were it not for Mr. Auster's canny eye for contemporary detail and his hero's existential leanings, the reader might well mistake ''Moon Palace'' for an 18th- or 19th-century novel. The book reads like a composite of works by Fielding, Dickens and Twain, with a faint 20th-century gloss of Ionesco and Camus. Not only is Marco an orphan, like so many picaresque heroes before him - his father apparently died before his birth; his mother was run over by a bus -but as depicted by Mr. Auster, he also becomes a latter-day Telemachus, bouncing from one coincidence to the next, as he searches for his father, the key to his own past and future.
A critic and translator as well as a novelist, Mr. Auster writes with an acute awareness of literary history, and while this self-consciousness never clouds his translucent prose, it does make for a narrative that bristles with allusions, symbols and inside jokes. Take Marco's name, for instance: the Marco refers to that wide-ranging traveler, Marco Polo; the Stanley, to the man who tracked down Livingstone and found fame in darkest Africa; the Fogg, to Phileas the explorer who saw the world in 80 days. All of them seekers, voyagers into the uncharted and unknown.
Marco's own journey is somewhat more internal. It begins with his farcical attempts to eke out a living in New York as a student on a fixed income. As his funds dwindle toward the end of his senior year, he slowly divests himself of his possessions and he eats less and less. He loses weight, grows emaciated, falls prey to hallucinations. He begins to see hidden connections everywhere he looks: the sign of a Chinese restaurant named Moon Palace reminds him of his uncle's jazz band, the Moon Men, which reminds him of the recent landing of the astronauts on the moon. The barren landscape of the moon, in turn, reminds him of the landscape of the West, which reminds him of the war against the Indians, which reminds him of Vietnam.
When he's no longer able to pay his rent, Marco heads for Central Park, where he becomes a sort of urban Robinson Crusoe, subsisting on garbage and handouts and savoring the solitude of his peculiar existence. He explains his failure to look for a job or ask friends for help as a fatalistic gesture - a determination ''to let chance determine what happened.'' Eventually, he falls ill and is rescued only thanks to the heroic efforts of two friends, who have somehow located him in the park.
Mr. Auster does little to make Marco's rescue seem particularly plausible, and as ''Moon Palace'' progresses, the oddities and coincidences proliferate. Marco falls in love with a Chinese dancer named Kitty, who happens to be wearing the same T-shirt as he is; she, too, turns out to be an orphan.
He then gets a job as a companion to an old man named Effing, who apparently shares his interest in the moon. The old man sends him out to the Brooklyn Museum to study a painting titled ''Moonlight.'' The painting depicts what appears to be a scene from the Wild West - a group of Indians and a man on horseback in a moonlit tableau.
This scene, oddly enough, echoes the strange story that Effing proceeds to tell Marco - a story of his own youthful adventures on the frontier. As Effing tells it, he had an earlier life as a painter named Julian Barber, and in this capacity, set out to explore the uncharted wilderness of the West during the early years of this century. Through a series of mishaps, Barber's companions were killed, and Barber himself was presumed to be dead, though he actually managed to survive by holing up in a cave belonging to a group of bandits. Along the way, he committed several murders, came into a large sum of money and decided to assume the new identity of Effing. It later turns out that in his previous life as Barber, he left behind a wife and infant son.
Why does that son - who has grown up to become a monstrously fat professor named Solomon Barber - take such an interest in Marco and Kitty? Does his extreme fatness bear some sort of relationship to Marco's previous state of near starvation?
And what of the other bizarre parallels in ''Moon Palace''? Do the correspondences between Marco's and Effing's adventures in the wilderness have any meaning? Why are both of them so obsessed with the image of the moon? And how will their respective journeys of exploration intersect?
No doubt in raising such questions, Mr. Auster means to comment, obliquely, on the old literary genres that used startling coincidences to propel their plots along, while reassuring the reader of an ordered and meaningful world. Not all of his own recurrent motifs - to the reader's frustration - connect quite so pleasingly; and his coincidences have a way of seeming preposterous, rather than indicative of a cosmic order. But then, perhaps that's simply a reflection of the modern world he's depicting. In any case, Mr. Auster has a lot of fun concocting Marco's adventures - almost as much fun as one has in reading them. Pearsond(Viking)