OK, I cheated. I checked out a couple of reviews on Amazon to see if I was the only one who encountered a massive depressurization after the midpoint of flying through this story. Paul Auster has a wonderfully clever premise on a coming of age tale of a ragamuffin boy from St Louis who is sold by his uncle to a "promoter" who sees the potential in Walt for human flight. Set in Wichita, I was settling in to a comfortable reminiscences of The Charlatan from the 2009 States' list, wondering what it is about otherwise dreadful Kansas that makes it such a perfect setting for hucksters and con artists. Wonderfully drawn, if slightly stock characters populate Walt's pre-flight years: his mentor, Master Yehudi, Mother Sioux, and Aesop the mentally brilliant/physically deformed Black orphan he grows up with.
Walt and the story get off the ground more through his own efforts than through any real instruction from the Master. They begin a successful, financially profitable tour until hormones kick in and adolescence brings Walt painfully back to Earth, a would-be Icarcus who never even gets close to the lights on Broadway and big time of New York City. Once Walt stops levitating, the book falls flat as well. The most bizarre and dissonant section comes in Part III when as a young adult club owner on the fringes of criminal Chicago mobs, Walt decides to kill Dizzy Dean. There are early hints of Walt's love of the St. Louis Cardinals, but this tangent is completely out in left field.
The reader experiences vertigo: the story free falls into a mundane, earth-bound conclusion. Walt's review of his life has so many things in its ledger that human flight merits equal mention with mediocre military service, drudge work in a New Jersey bakery, and managing laundromats back in Kansas. Auster undergoes his own descent when he cannot sustain a soaring story. The clever simile becomes a gimmick.
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