My Archive No. 7: Moon Palace

amf

Nov 18, 2025

This isn’t Auster’s best known book – that would be The New York Trilogy. And it’s not his most technically accomplished – that’s 4 3 2 1. But it was my entrée to his work, and I have no idea how it was that this was the first Auster I picked up, in the long-ago autumn of 2008, but I had heard about Auster and my curiosity had been piqued.

Things weren’t going as planned. I graduated into the worst economy in the better part of a century, and so work was scarce to say the least. My working and living situations involved varying degrees of legality, but I had a place to park my weary body, in a sublet underneath a shady daycare in a former crackhouse on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. But I assumed my living situation would someday make good material. I kept my emaciated frame going with tips from the local freegans and infinite flavors of instant noodle to try out from the Chinatown supermarkets and a knack for boosting bottles of Washington Riesling, I knew how to charm my way into a tech bro’s pack of American Spirits at Linda’s at happy hour, and above all else I had a stack of good library books.

And so it was that I chanced upon Moon Palace, the story of Marco Fogg, a young fuck-up who cares more for the great pile of books left by his uncle than the commitments of life and work, whose connections to family are limited to say the least, who dumpster dives in Central Park, whose melancholia is accentuated by the glimmer of the Chinese restaurant sign across the street (from which we get the name of the novel), who does occasional sponging of members of the ruling class who are endowed with trust funds and whom he is able to woo and who for some reason consider him a friend, for whom the nearest thing to a trust fund was that great pile of books.

Auster ends his book on the West Coast, looking out towards the Pacific, Marco Fogg saying this is where his life begins. For Auster, good Francophile that he was, I have to think this was a Truffaut reference. Auster watched Truffaut, and I read him, and as I read that I stepped into that radiant West Coast sunset too, not in balmy Southern California but in the last dying sunshine of the Northwest summer, at the charmless bus stop in the middle of the 520 at the Montlake exit, and I stood there amid the rush of traffic for a long long time.

That was a long time ago, and I would eventually read through nearly all of Auster (still got two or three to go, I think), and I would love some of his work, be pissed off by some, and at least enjoy the lion's share. But Moon Palace is closest to my heart, because it was that perfect message from the universe. It's gonna be OK, isn't it? More or less?