Leviathan

Peter and Benjamin

Peter Aaron and Benjamin Sachs meet in New York in the 1970s and form the kind of literary friendship that defines both men’s adult lives more completely than either fully recognizes at the time. Both are writers; both are serious; but they are serious in different registers. Aaron is disciplined, controlled, committed to the long work of making sentences. Sachs is wilder, more charismatic, more politically alive — a novelist whose work carries an urgency that Aaron’s, by Sachs’s own assessment, lacks. Auster structures the novel as Aaron’s attempt to write Sachs’s story before the FBI arrives to ask him about it, and this urgency — the knowledge, from the first page, that Sachs is already dead, already detonated alongside a replica of the Statue of Liberty in a Wisconsin field — gives the friendship its retrospective weight.

What Auster captures in the Aaron-Sachs dynamic is the particular texture of friendship between writers: the mutual admiration that is also measurement, the generosity that has competition folded inside it, the way two people who work in the same medium and care about the same things will use each other as mirrors and occasionally as targets. Aaron’s account of Sachs is also, inevitably, an account of what Aaron is not — the political conviction, the recklessness, the willingness to act rather than observe. The novel is structured as an act of witness, but witness is never neutral, and Aaron knows this.

Sachs’s Transformation

The pivotal event in Sachs’s trajectory from novelist to radical occurs at a Fourth of July party in Vermont: drunk and attempting to show off, Sachs falls from a fire escape and is caught by a man named Reed Dimaggio, who breaks his fall and saves his life. In the process, a gun falls from Dimaggio’s jacket and kills a man. Sachs survives; Dimaggio runs; and Sachs spends years trying to find him, to return to him the money he discovers Dimaggio had been carrying as part of a more complicated criminal scheme.

This accident — the fall, the gun, the death that Sachs witnessed without causing — is the hinge on which everything turns. It awakens in Sachs a political consciousness that his writing had never fully addressed: the gap between believing in justice and acting for it. He begins tracking down Dimaggio, and in the course of that investigation becomes involved with a woman who is herself involved with a man who has been systematically bombing replicas of the Statue of Liberty across the country as a protest against American hypocrisy. Sachs takes over the campaign. The logic of the transformation is psychological as much as political: the accident that almost killed him has made the gap between principle and action feel intolerable. The bombs are his attempt to close it. Aaron, reconstructing all of this from the outside, cannot tell whether Sachs has gone mad or simply become more honest than either of them managed to be.

The Bombing Campaign

The Statue of Liberty replicas that Sachs targets are, in Auster’s telling, perfectly chosen objects for a political vandal: America’s most legible symbol of its own ideals, reproduced across the country in miniature for civic decoration, available in every small town as an emblem of a promise the country has serially broken. To blow them up is to literalize a critique that most political writing only states. Sachs is not targeting people; he is targeting symbols, and the campaign is, in its own terms, coherent.

But Auster is not writing a novel of political endorsement. What the bombing campaign costs Sachs is everything else: his writing, his relationships, his ability to exist in ordinary life. The man who set out to act on his convictions has become someone who can do nothing except act on them. Aaron, writing in the novel’s opening pages from a position of grief and complicity, understands that Sachs’s death is not a martyrdom but a disappearance — the final vanishing act of a man who had been losing himself in stages since the night he fell from the fire escape and found that survival, without consequence, was more than he could bear. Leviathan takes its title from Hobbes, and the Hobbesian question it poses is the one Sachs could never answer: what authority do you submit to, and at what cost to yourself, when the authorities available to you have forfeited their claim?

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Auster’s most politically engaged novel, a portrait of American idealism and its self-consumption told through a friendship that neither man understood until it was too late to matter.

Reading Guides

• Paul Auster Books in Order: The Complete Reading Guide (2026)