Moon Palace Study Guide

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a middle-class Jewish family originally from Austria. Auster’s father, a landlord, and mother were unhappily married, and they divorced while Auster was in high school. Auster studied literature at Columbia University before moving to Paris and working as a translator. His 1982 literary debut, The Invention of Solitude, was a memoir about his father’s abrupt and early death. Auster became famous for his trio of postmodern detective novels, The New York Trilogy. Auster was briefly married to the writer and translator Lydia Davis, and later to the writer Siri Hustvedt until he died of lung cancer in 2024.

The plot and themes of Moon Palace are set against the dramatic cultural upheaval of the 1960s in the United States, although those events are rarely referenced directly. The 1969 moon landing, for Marco Fogg, comes to represent all the enormous transformations that American society underwent in that period. These transformations include the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the hippie counterculture, the Vietnam War and the protest movement against it, and innovation in music and other arts, and the rapid development of consumer technology and suburbanization, among others. Within Effing’s lifetime alone, for example, Utah was transformed from the proverbial “Wild West” of the American imagination to a prosaic part of modern America. Marco’s story and those of the other characters, then, reflect America in the wake of these drastic changes. By 1969, the novel seems to suggest, the world that many Americans had grown up in was a thing of the past.

While Moon Palace is a postmodern novel like Auster’s previous books, especially The New York Trilogy, it is also an absurdist and often comic story that draws on older forms like the 19th-century adventure novel. Auster’s interest in a uniquely American sense of detachment of placelessness—a lack of connection to history—is shared by other significantly postmodern novels of the time, like Don DeLillo’s Americana or The Names. The freewheeling, adventurous way that Moon Palace plays with historical references and characters like Edison and Tesla, however, is more reminiscent of a looser strand of postmodern writing represented by E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, which is set in the same early 20th-century period as Effing’s life story. Moon Palace is also modeled on classic picaresque novels and coming-of-age stories like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and early modern absurdist works like Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, which Auster’s novel references frequently.