From Publishers Weekly
It will come as no surprise to the gifted Auster's ( Moon Palace ; The Music of Chance ) many fans that walking on air, the implausible premise of his marvelously whimsical seventh novel, is treated with convincing gravity. Walt Rawley recounts his life: an orphan born in 1924 with "the gift," he was seized by his master, Mr. Yehudi, a Hungarian Jew who taught him to levitate. Yehudi takes the boy from St. Louis to his own Kansas menage, which consists of Mother Sioux and Aesop, a young black genius. (Also influencing Walt's life is classy, henna-headed Marion Witherspoon, a seductive mom figure from Wichita.) After harsh training, Walt tours with his mentor as "the Wonder Boy," aka Mr. Vertigo. Crammed into this road saga is the potent Americana of myth: the 1920s carnival circuit, Lindbergh's solo, the motorcar, the ethnic mix, the Ku Klux Klan and the Mob, baseball and Kansas, "land of Oz." Diverse mishaps descend, but eventually Walt glides into old age and writing. The characters speak a lusty lingo peppered with vintage slang, while a postmodern authorial irony tugs their innocence askew. The prose grows particularly electric when demystifying "loft and locomotion." Implicit is an analogy between levitation and the construct of fiction: both require fierce discipline to maintain a fleeting illusion. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Rescued from the streets of St. Louis and taught to fly by Master Yehudi, Walter Rawley soon becomes a national sensation. The boy wonder foils a kidnapping by his evil uncle, but his powers of levitation suddenly wane with the onset of puberty, and he declines from miracle worker to Depression-era mobster. Auster provides a dazzling display of narrative power, but his story remains a metaphysical muddle. Fluctuating between the fabulous and the mundane, it establishes no firm foundation in either realm. If Yehudi's mysterious powers are real, why must his wards die in a Klan lynching and why must Yehudi himself resort to suicide? If the alleged powers are spurious and Auster's aging narrator is unreliable, the extent of his unreliability needs sharper definition. Auster's previous novel, Leviathan (LJ 7/92), is a much more absorbing study of the elusiveness of truth.Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., CookevilleCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In novels such as Leviathan (1992), Auster has proved himself an expert in the weather of the mind and soul, particularly of the adult male variety, but here he casts all such subtlety aside to spin a tall tale about a boy who learns how to fly. The scene is St. Louis, circa 1926, and the boy is a scrappy orphan named Walter Claireborne Rawley, ward of his crude and cruel uncle Slim. When a mysterious stranger calling himself Master Yehudi asks Slim for the boy, he blithely gives him away. Walt soon finds himself in the middle of Kansas, far from his beloved St. Louis Cardinals and the action of city streets. His seemingly omnipotent master subjects him to a series of bloodcurdling trials, until, lo and behold, Walt is able to cavort in thin air. In no time, he's Walt the Wonder Boy, wowing audiences all across the country until his evil uncle Slim surfaces, looking for a payoff. Walt is our matter-of-fact narrator, ostensibly writing his memoir decades after these improbable events took place. His rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches story is spiked with bits of Americana, bursts of violence, condemnation of racism, and, frankly, more than a little silliness. Auster has tried some new things and conjured some curious characters, but there is something slippery about this fable. Master Yehudi, the character we want to know about most, remains annoyingly out of reach, while many other elements seem hollow or anemic. A transitional work but one that will garner attention. Donna Seaman


From Kirkus Reviews
Auster (Leviathan, 1992, etc.) departs from his usual cerebral fiction for this quick trip into Doctorow Land--a mytho-historical tale that invokes the American '20s, complete with glamorous gangsters and legendary sports stars. Writing in his anec-dotage, the septuagenarian Walter Rawley recalls his moment of fame back in his youth when he toured the country as ``Walter the Wonder Boy,'' a freckle-faced bumpkin who could walk through the air. Walter's levitations were no sham, but a carefully nurtured talent developed by the mysterious Master Yehudi, a Hungarian Jewish impresario who discovered Walter on the streets of St. Louis at age nine. ``A pus-brained ragamuffin from honky-tonk row,'' the orphaned Walter eventually submits to Yehudi's grueling regimen. Yehudi's household on the Kansas prairie harbors other outcasts also: Mother Sue, a stout Sioux who once performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show; and Aesop, a precocious crippled black foundling admitted to Yale. Yehudi and Walter finally take their show on the road after their house is visited by the KKK, who lynch Mother Sue and Aesop. Walter's fame grows rapidly. ``In the arms of the great ambient nothingness,'' he floats above ground, astounding audiences from coast to coast. His career is interrupted by a ghost from his past, a mean-spirited uncle who wants some of the loot. Then disaster strikes: The onset of puberty destroys his gift. Life after that is never the same. Yehudi shoots himself. Walter becomes a gangster in Chicago; develops a bizarre obsession with the great pitcher Dizzy Dean; and slowly fades away into alcoholic obscurity before recovering and writing this tale. Despite intimations of allegory and parable, Auster's dizzying trip through the century is not nearly as dimensional as Moon Palace, his previous escape from the metaphysical rigors of his shorter works into the picaresque. Disappointing. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


About the Author
The grandson of Jewish immigrants, Paul Auster was born in Newark in 1947, and grew up in South Orange and the New Jersey suburbs. He received an undergraduate degree and a master's in comparative literature from Columbia University in New York City. Then, after a six-month stint as an ordinary seaman on a tanker in the Gulf of Mexico, he spent four years in France, writing poems and doing translations to eke out a living. Back in New York, Auster got married, had a son, Daniel, and published four volumes of poetry - "only read by other poets," he claims. In 1979 his marriage broke up, his father died, and Auster found himself writing prose. Published in 1982 as the first half of a book called The Invention of Solitude, Portrait of an Invisible Man is a family memoir of a story Auster's father never told: the murder of his grandfather at the hands of the man's wife, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1919. Auster never went back to poetry. He has published eight novels in the last ten years, though he says in this interview, "Just because you've written one book doesn't mean you'll be able to write a second." A literary celebrity in Europe, Auster's work has been translated in to twenty languages and published to growing critical acclaim in the United States. He has just finished working on two movies in collaboration with Wayne Wang: Smoke, starring William Hurt and Harvey Keitel, for which he wrote the screenplay; and Blue in the Face, which he co-directed. In 1981 he met Siri Hustvedt, a novelist of Norwegian descent, at a poetry reading. They married in 1982, and live in a row house in Brooklyn's Park Slope with their daughter, Sophie, who is seven years old.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder Boy," a diminutive showman famous for stunning audiences across the country with his feats of levitation. Walt's teacher is Master Yehudi, a mysterious iconoclast who rescues him from poverty and instills in him the faith, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work essential to such a magnificent venture. Inevitably, Master Yehudi and Walt fall prey to the sinners thieves, and villains of America in its pre-depression heyday, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob, and Walt's resilience, like that of his young nation, is over and again challenged. Paul Auster, a "literary original" (Wall Street Journal) whose "bounties of intelligence, mystery and literary magic nourish and delight the mind" (Chicago Sun-Times), embraces both the realist and the mythic traditions in American literature. Walt and Yehudi are classic entrepreneur adventurers, and what they sell in Walt's performance is defiance of the natural laws governing men. This is an extraordinary, exuberant novel that captures the aspirations and excesses of a country ready to soar.

SYNOPSIS

A rollicking story of a child, his master, and the Vaudeville circuit, which serves as a metaphor for the American experience in the 20th century.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

It will come as no surprise to the gifted Auster's (Moon Palace, The Music of Chance) many fans that walking on air, the implausible premise of his marvelously whimsical seventh novel, is treated with convincing gravity. Walt Rawley recounts his life: an orphan born in 1924 with ``the gift,'' he was seized by his master, Mr. Yehudi, a Hungarian Jew who taught him to levitate. Yehudi takes the boy from St. Louis to his own Kansas menage, which consists of Mother Sioux and Aesop, a young black genius. (Also influencing Walt's life is classy, henna-headed Marion Witherspoon, a seductive mom figure from Wichita.) After harsh training, Walt tours with his mentor as ``the Wonder Boy,'' aka Mr. Vertigo. Crammed into this road saga is the potent Americana of myth: the 1920s carnival circuit, Lindbergh's solo, the motorcar, the ethnic mix, the Ku Klux Klan and the Mob, baseball and Kansas, ``land of Oz.'' Diverse mishaps descend, but eventually Walt glides into old age and writing. The characters speak a lusty lingo peppered with vintage slang, while a postmodern authorial irony tugs their innocence askew. The prose grows particularly electric when demystifying ``loft and locomotion.'' Implicit is an analogy between levitation and the construct of fiction: both require fierce discipline to maintain a fleeting illusion. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Rescued from the streets of St. Louis and taught to fly by Master Yehudi, Walter Rawley soon becomes a national sensation. The boy wonder foils a kidnapping by his evil uncle, but his powers of levitation suddenly wane with the onset of puberty, and he declines from miracle worker to Depression-era mobster. Auster provides a dazzling display of narrative power, but his story remains a metaphysical muddle. Fluctuating between the fabulous and the mundane, it establishes no firm foundation in either realm. If Yehudi's mysterious powers are real, why must his wards die in a Klan lynching and why must Yehudi himself resort to suicide? If the alleged powers are spurious and Auster's aging narrator is unreliable, the extent of his unreliability needs sharper definition. Auster's previous novel, Leviathan (LJ 7/92), is a much more absorbing study of the elusiveness of truth.-Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville

Jay Cantor - The New York Times

Mr. Auster adopts a more vernacular style than usual (though it's a brilliantly filigreed demotic, making it, of course, highfalutin in its own way).... The author's openness to chance and laundromats could lead to the slack picaresque throughout, but his story is usually held taut by the metaphorical meanings of flight.... The story is witty, inventive in its language, and invitingly playful with its metaphors. It has a fairy tale's compulsion to it.

The Washington Post

The author of Leviathan returns with a dazzling, picaresque, new novel in which Walter Claireborne Rawley, now an octogenarian, recounts his extraordinary vaudevillian adventures as "Walt the Wonder Boy" in 1924. "One hears every page of this novel, and sees it as well."

Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post