Many Voices, One Mind 
 Paul Auster has long been fascinated by popular fiction; 
 The Book of Illusions 
 for instance, my personal favorite among his works, is about an old-time film-maker. Like Michael Chabon ( 
 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay 
 ), Auster has a hankering for the good old yarns they don't tell any more: adventure stories more startling, romances more compelling, or mysteries more sinister than are now the fashion in this more nuanced age. Not that either author is devoid of nuance; Chabon burrows beneath his stories to reveal human depth; Auster erects a scaffolding around them to study the nature of story-telling itself, and what it reveals of our secret natures. Auster is the more abstract, but that doesn't stop him from being hugely enjoyable. This latest novel gripped me from the very beginning and didn't let go until almost the end. 
 The book is in four parts; the first three of these take place in 1967; the fourth is an addendum from forty years later. Each of the 1967 sections is told in a different voice, using the first, second, and third person respectively. So the opening is the first-person narrative of Adam Walker, a junior English major at Columbia and would-be poet. He meets a visiting professor from France, Rudolf Born, who offers to invest some family money in a literary magazine that Adam would edit. It seems a young writer's dream come true, but it doesn't feel entirely real and there are disturbing undertones. Gradually Adam gives in to a seduction that is at once intellectual and erotic, until the situation blows up in an encounter which makes him see Born in a different light. 
 The second part continues Adam's story with Born temporarily out of the picture. Auster is brilliant at capturing both the hot, lazy atmosphere of New York in summer and the loose-end feeling of a university student during the long vacation. The erotic element now takes center stage, and might well shock some readers by its explicitness and subject matter, yet Auster also seduces the reader with a romantic yearning that goes beyond the physical. The third part follows Adam to Paris in the fall, the Rive Gauche of the sixties being captured as beautifully as Morningside Heights had been. There Adam meets a brilliant young woman whose mother is about to marry Born; it is a touching and almost innocent relationship, but the elements of eroticism and menace from earlier in the book intervene here too. The final part ties up several of the loose ends, but also questions the veracity of others. In the end, one is left wondering whether any of this supposedly factual narrative is true. 
 Hang on--isn't it absurd to question levels of truth in a work of fiction? Only if you forget that even fiction reflects someone's truth, that of the author. The invisible presence of the title here is the author himself, hidden behind pseudonyms and layers of narrative. Walker sends part 1 of his story to an old college friend, now a famous novelist, who assembles Adam's notes for publication much as in The Locked Room, the third novella in 
 The New York Trilogy 
 . Advising Walker to shift to the second person, he cites his own experience: "By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible... I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space...." Auster takes his own advice. Adam Walker is another example of Auster's continuing attempt throughout his novels to write about himself in other persons, other voices. Of course some of his story is "untrue," because any writer makes things up, just as any writer calls upon true experience. The book is a demonstration of how fiction is written, by starting with the known and imagining into the unknown. 
 There is, admittedly, a strongly narcissistic quality to the book, which reaches its height in Adam's obsession with his sister. Why should we care about a self-absorbed author if he merely rearranges the lily pads on his reflecting pool? And yes, there are Auster novels where the self-reflexive technique grows tedious. But not this one. Here, Auster lays aside his adult concerns and focuses with astonishing perception on those few years of young manhood where narcissism is everything. What we see of the adult relationships in the book (with the single exception of Born's) seem contented and stable; the young Adam, by contrast, lives in a world of wish-fulfillment, whether granted or frustrated, as though creating his own life in order to live in it. 
 In Adam's first conversation with Born, for instance, it can be hard to tell between the professor and the pupil; quotation marks and speech prefixes are meaningless if both voices are projections of the same mind. The three different women with whom Adam gets involved--the virgin, the whore, and the virtual twin--seem like the fantasy objects of late teen libido. Almost fifty years ago now, but I recognize the futility still--and the thrill of that brave new world. Adam's student Paris in the sixties is my own student Paris. While my life has been much less colorful, I have seldom read a book that so perfectly captured the self-dramatizing quality I cringe to recall from that age, or the combination of brashness and insecurity that gave rise to it. Painful but magnificent!