From Publishers Weekly
Marco Fogg, loner and dreamer, is forced from his Manhattan apartment and roams Central Park as a vagrant until he is rescued by gentle Kitty Wu. "The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction," said PW . Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
"It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future." Yet this novel deals precisely with the future that protagonist Marco Stanley Fogg seems to doubt the most: his own. We see Marco through several quite remarkable years, during which he nearly starves himself to death out of poverty and dejection, is rescued by a beautiful Chinese girl named Kitty Wu, and ends up as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession and the focus of the novel. Indeed, the old man's tale eventually becomes Marco's, spiraling into one big center where everything and everyone is (literally!) related. The novel's fantastic quality can be hard to swallow, and some of the action is maddeningly distant, but it's interesting, worthwhile reading.- Jessica Grim, NYPLCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

ANNOTATION

Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg in Moon Palace Fogg goes through a period of time when he nearly starves himself to death out of poverty and dejection, is rescued by a beautiful Chinese girl named Kitty Wu, and ends up as the live-in helper to an invalid old man, the recording of whose life story becomes Marco's obsession and the focus of the novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction by award-winning novelist and poet Auster. Marco Fogg is a loner and a dreamer, whose ``mind is on the moon,'' and who in a state of elation unfolds moonlore to his friends. The year of the moon landing finds Fogg living in spartan reclusivity until forced from his New York apartment to roam as a Central Park vagrant. His rescue by Kitty Wu, a gentle Chinese girl, leads to their poignant and tenuous love. Like some of Auster's earlier protagonists, Fogg senses he has a kindred, submerged or vanished other self. Here, it is Fogg's father, who went into eclipse before his birth; the quest for the parent forms a narrative thread. When Fogg serves as reader/companion to the elderly cripple Barber, aka ``Effing,'' who recounts his adventures in a Western wilderness where he buried a cache of paintings, Fogg's fate takes an unexpected turn.

Library Journal - Grimm

The novel's fantastic quality can be hard to swallow, and some of the action is maddeningly distant, but it's interesting, worthwhile reading. -- Library Journal

Allon Reich

Moon Palace is a richly textured fairy tale which is his most sustained and powerful work to date. . . . The story is told in regulated, measured prose, sufficiently flexible to accommodate, at certain moments, an emotional intensity which Auster has not achieved in his fiction before. . . . [The book] becomes a semi-nostalgic epitaph for the lost innocence of the 1960s American dream, when a young man could still get west, chastened by his voyage through the vast empty wilderness, and declare that 'this is where my life begins'. -- The New Statesman

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING