Martin's survey of Paul Auster's work up until Leviathan contains very little that is original. The well-worn critical terrain of discussing postmodernist theory and relating it to aspects in Auster's work is retraced, but with less incisiveness than in previous works by Dennis Barone, Ilana Shiloh, Stephen Weisenburger and Tim Woods. The statement “I will examine how facets of each of these theories can be applied to Auster's writing” (2) should be enough fill most scholars widely read in Auster criticism with a sense of repetitive nausea. Whilst it should be accepted that this book is part of a series of “textbooks,” aimed at undergraduates, it must still be argued that too great a proportion of it recapitulates exhausted lines of argument.

Having made the point that Auster's fiction features an ongoing engagement with his concerns relating to chance, contingency, isolation and postmodern autobiography, Martin may just as usefully have moved on to discuss other, largely unexplored, aspects of Auster's work. Other scholars, including Timothy Bewes and Josh Cohen, have begun to investigate the close links between Auster's Jewish American background and some of the aesthetic and thematic concerns of his work. These studies are as illuminating as any that posit a universal postmodernist explication of Auster's recurrent motifs.

For this reason it was particularly disappointing to me that the book designated virtually no space to exploring Auster's already considerable post-9/11 oeuvre. Auster has in the last seven years continued to develop his apocalyptic sense of life in contemporary America and to use the Holocaust as a motif that has surfaced throughout his novels and films. Whilst Auster has remained preoccupied with the process of overcoming obstacles to the production of literature, he has retained his sense of indignation towards successive American administrations and missed opportunities for change in his country's history.

In recent novels and films Auster has also reversed his usual drive to defend the production of art at all personal costs and begun to explore the effects this mentality has on the artist and those around him. Having made this point, it is clear that studies of Auster's work are not at the point of becoming repetitive through necessity, as was perhaps the case in the mid-1990s. But to all intents and purposes this is the point at which Martin ceases from any sustained investigation of Auster's work, making this book something of a disappointment.

Much the same can be said of Paul Auster by Mark Brown. I felt slightly more sympathy with this volume (aimed at “general readers, students and specialists” (back cover)), as it endeavours to illuminate a slightly different aspect of Auster's work to that covered in previous studies. Brown provides a full-length investigation into the way that characters in Auster's novels and films interact with the postmodern metropolis, and uncovers some interesting correlations between location, language and identity.

Because Brown tries gamely to work closely within a predefined set of critical parameters, and because he displays an impressive erudition of Auster's oeuvre (encompassing poetry, fiction, film and unpublished works from the Berg Collection), there is every chance that even serious readers of Auster criticism will find some aspects illuminating.

Sadly, however, one could level a similar criticism at Brown to that levelled at Martin, and argue, quite reasonably, that in his zeal to squeeze the author's work into the tight fit of his own work's overall premise, Brown has wilfully ignored much that clearly influences Auster's writing. A good example of this can be found when, in an early discussion of Auster's flâneur characters, Brown cites an essay by Auster about the poet Charles Reznikoff. Brown relates the essay to his own theme of the “strange and transitory beauty of the urban landscape” (9) and the poet's alienation as a symptom of the metropolitan condition. He fails to mention, however, that Auster makes explicit that the “double alienation” described is symptomatic of Reznikoff's condition as a Jewish American.

Furthermore, in Brown's discussion of Auster's early novella Ghosts, there is an overreliance, common in Auster criticism, on the notion that the isolation of the character Blue is a “self-imposed” (35) ascetic experiment. Once again, Brown overlooks a central motif in Auster's work – that of coercion, or the will of the artist to impose his world view upon his subject or reader. This, surely, is what Blue is a “victim” of. A basic understanding of Auster's “borrowing” in this novella reveals that the competing drives of the two main protagonists recapitulate those of Henry David Thoreau and John Brown, towards asceticism, writing, protest and coercion.

These new works may provide a good starting point or overview for students. It is clear, however, that there is a good deal of mileage left in Auster criticism, especially in view of his now considerable post-9/11 oeuvre, although both Martin and Brown barely skim the surface. Brown does provide some commentary of Oracle Night and The Brooklyn Follies, but describes Auster's engagement with 9/11 as “tangential” (192). Other critics have taken the view that these novels are both heavily influenced by 9/11 and the “war on terror” (as were the subsequent Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark), and it has even been suggested that The Book of Illusions was a “prescient” engagement with several associated issues. In light of this I do not expect either of these studies to become recognized as in any way “definitive” in the future.