"We lived in a different world back then, and the things the master and I did together wouldn't be possible today. They wouldn't stand for it."

A fable is defined as a short moral story; a story or legend about fantastic or mythical characters. Paul Auster's new novel is an American fable which, while hardly short, is certainly about fantastical things.

"I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water," explains the narrator, Walt. At the opening, he is discovered by the mysterious Hungarian émigré Master Yehudi as one of those rare individuals possessed of the ability to fly. The young Walt scarcely believes him, but travels far from his St. Louis home to the Kansas farm inhabited by Yehudi's curious family - the educated black youth called Aesop, and Mother Sue (Sioux), an Indian who previously toured Europe as part of Buffalo Bill's travelling show. Here Walt is forced to undertake a series of gruelling tasks and tests from days of silence to being buried underground, but at the end, with all his strength of will, he can indeed defy gravity. Together, Walt and Master Yehudi set out to tour the country with their astonishing Walt the Wonder Boy act, but it's only the beginning of Walt's own extraordinary journey through a 20th century of adversity, violence and magic.

Mr Vertigo is a deceptively simple tale. Walt is a deceptively simple teller of tales, and through him Auster is able to render everyday, almost prosaic the most extraordinary of things. That the boy can fly is a given; as his audience we simply accept the changes and embellishments he chooses to make the act a money-spinner. That is the real triumph of the book. That and the occasional tragedies that befall our hero. For out of the Kansas landscape at one point ride the Ku Klux Klan with a lynching on their mind. And later, success encourages Walt's relatives to make fiery and violent claims on his estate. It's a given that eventually Mister Yehudi and the amazing flying boy will be parted, but the manner of that parting is wrenching and beautifully realised. The repercussions echo for the remainder of the book.

Elegant, simply written, Auster shoots his narrative through with wit and a cinematic grasp of time and place that seems at times to be almost a film script with the blank bits sketched in. If anyone should ever put it on the screen it will almost certainly fail.

There's nothing to this book, but its hooks bury themselves deep in the mind: "That's how it's done...You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground." Like Auster's prose, Mister Yehudi's recipe for flight is deceptively artless. A picturesque, puzzling, captivating yarn.