Invisible
By Paul Auster
Faber £16.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

If this were a Paul Auster novel, instead of a review of a Paul Auster novel, it would include a sparsely furnished room, a writer trying to solve a mystery, some sly literary and historical allusions, an improbable coincidence, a story within a story, a scene or two in Paris, a gathering sense of menace, an absent father, an enigmatic woman, and several characters recycled from previous Auster works.

It would not contain many adjectives or memorable turns of phrase. Auster’s prose is a sparsely furnished room, so sleekly, self-referentially postmodern that you could call him Paul Austere.

No wonder they love him in France. His first three novels, published as The New York Trilogy in 1987, are still widely available there. New Auster works sometimes appear in France first, even though he writes in English, grew up in New Jersey and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, novelist Siri Hustvedt. Among English-speakers, however, Auster is known for constructing small, airtight worlds rather than connecting with the real one.

His latest novel may improve that situation. True, Invisible is stuffed with Austerisms: not one writer but two, an enigmatic woman, an absent father, several scenes in Paris and a mystery that spans four decades. And the prose is as spare as ever. The book’s opening line, “I shook his hand for the first time in the spring of 1967,” is about as racy as it gets.

In Auster’s two previous, typically noirish novels, Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, much of the action takes place in a single room. Invisible, by contrast, gets outdoors and deals with actual events, such as France’s war in Algeria and America’s in Vietnam. Auster conjures full-blooded characters he has not used before, a freight train of a storyline, and just enough structural tricks to remind you who the author is. The narration, for instance, shifts from the first person “I” to the second-person “you” to the third-person “he.” Tenses change with the seasons, literally – and so deftly you barely notice.

The “I” is aspiring writer Adam Walker, a student at New York’s Columbia University in the Vietnam-haunted year of 1967 (as was Auster then). Adam describes that first handshake, and subsequent dealings, with a charismatic French lecturer and Algerian war veteran named Rudolf Born, and with Born’s mysterious girlfriend Margot. Their relationship goes downhill fast, culminating in an appalling act of violence. Born escapes to Paris.

Forward to 2007. Jim, a New York writer who has not seen Adam Walker since their Columbia days, receives an unfinished memoir from his former classmate. Adam is dying of cancer and needs Jim’s help to finish the manuscript. That turns out to be the first-person account we have just read. Before Jim responds, Adam manages to complete the memoir and send it to Jim. It tells how, shortly after the crime, Adam heads to Paris to wreak vengeance on Born. But what Adam finds, and does, is so upsetting that he can tell the story only in the second person.

Then Jim takes over, in the third person. He tries to figure out what happened 40 years earlier. In Paris he encounters Cécile Juin, a student who had a crush on Adam. She helps Jim track Born to a Caribbean island, where many loose ends are tied. But not all. Did Adam commit an outrage of his own in 1967? Did Born, a French intelligence agent, assassinate Cécile’s father? And what to make of Born’s surname, which he shares with a Provençal poet who wrote 800 years ago about the joys of slaughter?

Auster keeps readers guessing, but Invisible seems more human than some of his other puzzlers. Adam’s undergraduate righteousness is touching. Born’s Gallic swagger is mesmerising. And a scene in which Adam and his sister commemorate the birthday of their dead younger brother will break your heart.

Perhaps Auster, now 62, feels he can lighten up a bit. That maturity may not liberate Auster scholars, who blog and theorise about his names, games and allusions. Is Cécile Juin linked to Alphonse Juin, the 20th-century French military hero who opposed independence for Algeria? Is Adam Walker a reference to the 18th-century British inventor of that name?

And is Auster trying to make some kind of statement about the evil of war or the fatuity of revenge? More likely, he is a writer telling a story about a writer telling a story about those vanished days of youth and upheaval, when everything seemed possible and the world was full of mystery.

Donald Morrison’s ‘The Death of French Culture’ will be published by Polity in spring 2010