Fiction:Stripped of the power of recall, yet plagued by a stream of bewildering pictures in his mind; unable to remember names yet determined to put a title and a story on everything and everyone he sees, the protagonist of Paul Auster's 13th novel finds himself apparently locked in a room to which only words and images hold the key.
But a key can turn either way. Language and memory may be Mr Blank's prison cell, or they may be his only hope. They may, in fact, be both at once. Mr Blank's creator certainly isn't telling.
After the relative, well, folly that was his last book, The Brooklyn Follies, Auster returns, with this terse novel, to the mirrored halls of metaphysics through which he has led the way for much of his career. Mr Blank is a character perplexed by meaning at the most basic level, unsure of who he is, where he is, or how he has come to be there. Around him in this room, physical objects are fixed with labels bearing their names - or alleged names - and on the desk at which he sits are photographs and reports, showing and telling of people whom he feels himself to have wronged in some way, at some time, but he cannot tell how. The world and its history lie outside the shutters of his windows, shutters he is advised not to touch by the visitors who come bearing care, counsel or recrimination. They give him pills for a condition he does not understand - the pills are to help him forget, one visitor says; the papers are to help him remember, implies another - and they make vague remarks about the suffering he has put them through. "Let's just say there's a lot of resentment," says the policeman, James P Flood. "You did what you had to do," says another, Blank's nurse Anna Blume. "So many charges have been filed against you, I'm drowning in paperwork," says his lawyer, one Daniel Quinn.
If these visits cause Blank's mind to creep with a sense of the uncanny, they seem intended to have a similar effect on Auster's readers. For each visitor to Blank's room has travelled from the realm of Auster's own bibliography; every name in the novel is a name from one of his past novels. Even the title has roots gnarled into the sediment of self-reference; in The Book of Illusions (2002), Travels in the Scriptorium is a novel written by the writer who is the protagonist of a film watched by the main characters of Auster's novel. Confused? That's part of the fun.
Ornamented with its clever quirks, fashioned into its intertextual twists and turns, the book is never far shy of gimmickry, and there are points at which Auster seems to have a vexingly slight grip on what scant logic his narrative possesses; to be making things up as he goes along. To be making things up as he goes along? As, say, a writer of fiction might presume to do? The book's achievement - which comes into sight drastically late in its game, as Auster's own relation to Blank makes its presence intimately and ambivalently felt - is to reflect back to us our own impatience, our patterns, our presumptions, as readers, and to reveal itself as more than just as a book preoccupied by the matters of which fiction is made. Live, mysterious, unfinished, and oddly poignant, it is a fiction in real time; a narrative which, like its protagonist, "can never die", a process within a practice, playing fast and loose with the fondest conventions of that practice, even as it relies on them to get its story told. And now that it has been told, and now that Auster has gazed long and hard into the pool of his creative past, all eyes will be on the stories, on the fictional worlds, for which this self-curated retrospective will pave the way.
• Belinda Mckeon is a writer and journalist. She teaches on the undergraduate writing programme at Columbia University
• Travels in the Scriptorium By Paul Auster Faber, 120pp. £12.99