Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure
Paul Auster
Faber & Faber hbk, 436 pgs, £15.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
The latest from the new great man of American letters Paul Auster is an immensely likeable comic memoir about struggling to keep your head above water and true to your Art. It's an autobiographical follow up to The Red Notebook collection and is about money - and not having any - with Hand To Mouth itself ending only a third of the way through. The remainder are three enormous and enormously entertaining footnotes. Beautifully designed and, like all Auster books, beautifully and precisely written.