Moon Palace by Paul Auster
Published 1989 · 373 pages · 112,769 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age
How hard is Moon Palace to read?
Moon Palace scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Auster writes in educated, literary prose that draws on cultural references (Marco Polo, Phileas Fogg, Schopenhauer) without obscure terminology. The register is closer to The Great Gatsby than to Moby-Dick — sophisticated but never arcane. Occasional philosophical vocabulary emerges naturally from the narrator's Columbia-educated voice.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Sentences are varied and carefully constructed but remain accessible. Auster favors smooth subordination and rhythmic accumulation rather than Jamesian hypotaxis or Faulknerian run-ons. The first-person retrospective narration moves with narrative ease, making complex emotional material syntactically transparent.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Concrete events — selling books, pushing a wheelchair, living in a hollowed apartment — carry the novel's weight, but philosophical meditations on coincidence, identity, and the relationship between past and present run throughout. Effing's speech about triangulation and the moon ('you can only locate yourself by looking at what you are not') is representative: abstraction grounded in specific scene.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- The novel manages three generations of story, multiple narrative frames (Effing's oral confession, Barber's embedded history), and a web of literary and cultural allusions without feeling encyclopedic. Auster paces his revelations carefully. The density is real but never overwhelming, closer to Austerlitz than to War and Peace.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Fogg narrates mostly directly but the novel's central concern — the relationship between chance, inheritance, and selfhood — must be constructed by the reader from the pattern of coincidences. The thematic connection between the three men (Fogg, Effing, Barber) is pointed to but not explained. The reader is trusted to assemble the meaning.
- Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
- The Moon Palace neon sign, the 1,492 boxes of books (Columbus's year), the eclipse metaphor for self-erasure, the desert as existential void, the name Fogg (obscuration, wandering) — symbols are dense and interconnected. The moon itself recurs as a figure for distance, illusion, and the aspiration that makes location possible. Richer than The Great Gatsby, less totalizing than Moby-Dick.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Fogg narrates with retrospective distance and occasional dry wit — his elaborate philosophical justifications for his own passivity are presented with a self-awareness that borders on self-parody. But the novel's emotional register is fundamentally sincere: grief for Uncle Victor, the abortion crisis, the loss of Kitty are rendered without ironic insulation.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The novel resolves its central genealogical mysteries but leaves its existential questions — whether the pattern of coincidences constitutes meaning or only resembles it — deliberately open. The Utah cave may or may not exist. The three-generation structure suggests design, but whether that design is cosmic or narrative remains the reader's question.
- Structural complexity: 62 out of 100
- The novel embeds three narrative layers: Fogg's first-person account frames Effing's oral autobiography which itself contains Barber's story. The genealogical discoveries work as retroactive structural revelations that reframe everything the reader has already processed. This is deliberate and moderately demanding — more complex than Gatsby, less formally radical than Midnight's Children.
How Moon Palace is regarded
Moon Palace holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.