BOOKS: Anti-Gravity

PAUL AUSTER, 47, HAS won a cult following in the U.S. and occasional best- seller status in Europe by playing new tricks with established literary forms. He mixes some of the experimental whimsy of a Borges or a Calvino with the narrative drive that made old-fashioned stories so appealing in the first place. When he riffs on detective fiction, for example, as he does in the novels that constitute his New York Trilogy — City of Glass (1985), Ghosts and The Locked Room (both 1986) — he sees to it that readers craving mystery, as well as or instead of Postmodernist games, will not go away hungry.

In his eighth novel, Mr. Vertigo (Viking; 293 pages; $21.95), Auster again dips into the collective memory bank, offering a hero-narrator made up in part of Twain, Horatio Alger and the Dead End Kids. Walter Claireborne Rawley first appears as a nine-year-old St. Louis street urchin in 1924. Jaded beyond his years, with a side-of-the-mouth style of flip talk (“Well, shave my tonsils”), Walt recalls meeting the mysterious Master Yehudi, the man who would change his life: “We were standing in front of the Paradise Cafe, a slick downtown gin mill.” “You’re no better than an animal,” the master greets him. “If you come with me, I’ll teach you how to fly.”

For all his street smarts, Walt buys this line. Luckily for him the master is not a child molester but a visionary entrepreneur. He puts the little smart aleck through several years of grueling physical and spiritual drills. One day Walt finds himself rising off the kitchen floor. What he has learned is not how to fly, exactly, but how to perform increasingly prolonged and baroque feats of levitation.

After much rehearsal, he and the master hit the show-biz circuit, breaking in the act at rural fairs and carnivals. Walt steadily improves, and so do his bookings: “We stunned them in Worcester. We wowed them in Springfield. They dropped their drawers in Bridgeport.” His self-regard soars as well: “I was Walt the Wonder Boy, the diminutive daredevil who defied the laws of gravity, the one and only ace of the air.” He is struck by the fact that his triumphs take wing in the same year, 1927, that Lindbergh flies across the Atlantic: “I didn’t know the Lone Eagle from a hole in the ground, but I felt linked to him after that, as if we shared some dark fraternal bond. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that his plane was called the Spirit of St. Louis.”

It can’t last, of course, and somewhere around the Wall Street Crash of 1929 the self-proclaimed “hottest child star since David loaded up his slingshot and let ‘er rip” is permanently grounded. “I’ll have to change your name to Mr. Vertigo,” teases his saddened, sympathetic master. “Mr. Dizzy-in-the- Head. Mr. Fear-of-Heights.”

Unfortunately, Walt’s story is not over. By the time he gets to the part about owning a Chicago nightclub and advising an over-the-hill Dizzy Dean on career options, Auster’s flamboyant inventiveness seems to be spinning its wheels. His clever parable about innocence and its loss comes down to a bumpy landing.