Paul Auster's "Report From the Interior" Mark Lennihan/Associated Press Paul Auster Writing multiple novels is generally considered a triumph, writing multiple memoirs a somewhat shameful habit. Still, I've never heard anyone sniff about Paul Auster's autobiographical recidivism; perhaps his 16 acclaimed novels compensate for it. In any case, on the basis of his five memoirs alone, Auster should be recognized as one of the great American prose stylists of our time. "Report From the Interior" is a companion text to the 2012 "Winter Journal." Where that book was a history of the author's body, this one is a history of his psychological development, from childhood through early adulthood. Both use second-person narration, which is easy to label a gimmick, but here it feels natural, inextricable from the rest of the prose. In the first of the book's four sections, Auster describes his childhood by presenting a series of objects. In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. In one heartbreaking scene, Auster's father buys a small collection of Army surplus items and claims them as his, afraid to disappoint his son with the truth that he'd never served in the military. The anecdote brilliantly translates the childhood emotional experience in which mundane objects - in this case a canvas-wrapped tin canteen - seem to accumulate mythologies all by themselves. This first part, dotted with serendipities and nearly magical coincidences, recalls Auster's volume of "true stories," "The Red ­Notebook." On the first day of junior high school: "You saw that it was exactly 7 a.m., that the second hand was sweeping past the 9 on its way to the 12, meaning that you had woken up 10 seconds before you had to, and you, who had always slept so soundly, who could never wake up without the blasting bell of an alarm, had woken to silence for the first time in memory, as if you had been counting down the seconds in your dreams." I might belong to the last generation of people who watched the sweep of second hands on clocks, but the sweep is so vivid, I almost brace myself for the inevitable jangling bell. The second section consists of almost scene-by-scene summaries of two films Auster describes as "blows to the head": "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang." The approach brings to mind his 1997 book "Hand to Mouth," in which he recounts the various jobs he took in his 20s and 30s, including writing a synopsis of a screenplay. Perhaps I am inclined more to reading than to watching, but despite knowing both films, I found a furious momentum in this section. The third section collects annotated passages from Auster's letters to the writer and translator Lydia Davis, his college sweetheart and first wife. The correspondence contains all the flaws you'd expect from a young writer: badly extended metaphors, attempts at highbrow humor, passages in French, condescending advice about what to read and how to think. ("Don't be discouraged about being a woman. It's a fine profession.") I don't much care that Auster (correctly) values Henry Miller above Jack Kerouac or that the letter written after this pronouncement reads like semi-­digested Henry Miller, but it's the sort of thing that will interest those who want to witness Auster's first tentative steps toward becoming a serious writer. In 1969, at age 22, he observes: "For me the problem of the world is first of all a problem of the self, and the solution can be accomplished only by beginning within and then . . . moving without." This of course foreshadows the project of this book and its predecessor. The most interesting moment here is when the older Auster realizes the letters were a proxy for a diary. Recognizing neither the tone nor his own adolescent handwriting, he understands that "this massive pile of paper was the journal you hadn't been able to write when you were 18, that the letters were nothing less than a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood, . . . the only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past." Sarah Manguso is the author, most recently, of the memoir "The Guardians."