From brilliant to blah

There's nothing in Paul Auster's latest book, Report from the Interior, that immediately flags the author as a narcissist, just an increasingly painful and self-indulgent preoccupation with himself from the first page to the last.

I'm not exactly sure what the US author of some of my favourite novels is trying to achieve. The book is too bitty to be a memoir, too insubstantial to be an autobiography and far too personal to be anything else.

I became a fan of Paul Auster in my early 20s when I read his absurdist novel, The Music of Chance - a gripping examination of the role of coincidence and randomness in our lives. Later, I devoured many more of his stories, most memorably a fairytale novel, Mr Vertigo, about a boy's mission to learn to fly. His most acclaimed book is New York Trilogy.

Because I like his novels so much I looked forward to Report from the Interior, even though I'd read that his previous work, Winter Journal, also a kind of autobiography, "is a terrible book".

The first paragraph of Report from the Interior is beautifully imagined, thoughtfully worded prose describing the naivety of childhood.

All enjoyment of the book ended there.

It is a history of memorable moments that have affected Auster's psychological development. All good, perhaps - provided that his insights are deep and universal.

Some of them are, but there are not enough of them to warrant plodding through 274 pages of rambling rememberings, padded with some letters, movie reviews and random pictures.

The book is divided into three parts - four if you count the pictures. It starts with an account of moments in Auster's childhood full of rhetorical patter, contextualised with lists of historical facts here and there. Though his experiences are well described, there are too many anecdotes and there is too much banality, which left me wondering why I should care about his first trip to summer camp or the meaning of his dissection of the family radio.

Perhaps I would care if Auster had refrained from using the highly irritating trope of writing the novel to himself using second-person narration. The gimmick falls flat. It left me feeling like I was eavesdropping on a schizophrenic talking to himself.

The second part of the book is even more self-indulgent. It consists of two long-winded synopses of movies that affected him as a teenager: The Incredible Shrinking Man and I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

The last section is made up of Auster's letters to the woman who would become his first wife, Lydia Davis. He tells himself that these letters are: "a time capsule of your late adolescence and early adulthood. The only door you have ever found that opens directly onto your past".

There are two elements of the book I liked: the charting of the journey out of innocence into experience, and the description of his early experience of writing (though Stephen King does this far better in On Writing).

Many writers use their personal experience as the starting point for their stories. Alice Monroe's book of short stories, Dear Life, is a good case in point.Imagination, the crafting of an interesting narrative, a good plot, a light touch and merciless editing turn those personal experiences into something worth reading. Perhaps Auster's next book will be better.