Editors Reads Verdict
Auster's most picaresque novel — a magical realist fable about American history told through the life of a boy who can fly, spanning the 1920s jazz era through the Depression and beyond, full of energy and historical colour.
What We Loved
- The decision to render levitation as simply real — no explanation offered, no genre signal given — gives the novel a fairy-tale directness that Auster's more self-conscious fiction sometimes lacks
- Walt's voice is one of Auster's most vigorous — American vernacular, rough-edged, entirely unsentimental
- The historical panorama (the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression, WWII) is integrated into Walt's personal story with considerable skill
Minor Drawbacks
- The novel's picaresque structure means it is episodic rather than tightly constructed — some episodes feel more incidental than others
- Master Yehudi's cultural background (Jewish, from Central Europe) is used somewhat symbolically rather than fully explored
- The magic realist premise requires readers to simply accept the levitation, which can feel like an abdication rather than an artistic choice
Key Takeaways
- → American history is lived from the bottom — by orphans, outcasts, and performers — rather than from the top
- → The ability to fly is a metaphor for the experience of being above ordinary circumstances while remaining attached to them
- → Talent is not sufficient; what you do with it depends on who found you and when
| Author | Paul Auster |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Pages | 293 |
| Published | February 1, 1995 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Best For | Readers of American literary and historical fiction; those who enjoy picaresque narratives and magical realism in a historical American setting. |
Walt on the Streets of St. Louis
Walt the Wonder Boy is nine years old when the novel opens, filthy and feral and subsisting on the margins of 1927 St. Louis, a child with the survival instincts of a much older man and the complete absence of any expectation that the world will be kind to him. He is not a sentimentalised orphan — Auster gives him a voice that is vernacular, profane, and entirely free of self-pity — and when a tall, strangely dressed man named Master Yehudi approaches him with a proposition, Walt’s first instinct is not hope but calculation.
Master Yehudi is one of Auster’s most fully realised characters: a Hungarian-born Jewish immigrant of indeterminate origin, learned, enigmatic, possessed of beliefs about the human body and the human will that are not available to conventional explanation. His household includes a Black woman named Mother Sioux and her son Aesop, and the strange family they form — in a farmhouse in rural Kansas, far from the segregated worlds of both St. Louis and the jazz-age north — is one of the novel’s quiet arguments about American possibility.
What Yehudi proposes is that Walt learn to levitate. The training begins. Auster handles this with fairy-tale directness: there is no scientific explanation, no genre framing, no wink at the reader’s scepticism. The levitation is simply a fact of the novel’s world, as mysterious to its practitioners as it is to the audience who will eventually pay to see it, and the training that produces it is rendered as a physical and psychological ordeal that Walt undergoes with the grim determination of a boy who has nothing else.
The Performances Across America
Walt learns to fly — first inches, then feet, then high enough to be genuinely extraordinary — and Master Yehudi takes him on the road. The performances that follow carry the novel through the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, through the Harlem Renaissance and the opening years of the Depression, and Auster uses Walt’s travels as a way of moving through American history from a position of decided marginality.
The act itself is spectacular: a boy who rises into the air while audiences in theatres and vaudeville houses across the country watch in silence. But Auster is interested less in the spectacle than in what it costs. Walt’s ability to levitate is dependent on conditions — physical and psychological — that prove increasingly difficult to maintain as he grows older and as the America he is touring begins to darken. The Depression does not spare performers, and the world that cheered Walt the Wonder Boy in 1928 has less capacity for wonder by 1932.
Walt’s voice throughout is one of the pleasures of the novel: American and brash and shot through with the hard-won humour of someone who has seen enough of life’s underside to know that spectacle is always temporary. His relationship with Master Yehudi deepens as the years pass, acquiring the complexity of a father-son bond that neither can quite name, and the affection between them is the emotional centre of the novel’s first half.
After the Ability Fades
The ability does not last. Auster does not treat this as tragedy but as the natural consequence of time — of the body changing, of the particular conditions that made levitation possible ceasing to obtain. Walt grows up, and what a grown man Walt becomes is not the Wonder Boy’s obvious successor. He falls into other lives, other American decades, carrying the experience of having once been able to fly as a private fact that shapes his understanding of everything else.
The novel’s second half follows Walt through the middle decades of the twentieth century — through WWII and its aftermath, through the postwar boom, into the turbulent 1960s and finally the 1970s when he is an old man — and the picaresque structure allows Auster to range freely across American history as seen from below. Walt is never at the centre of events but always adjacent to them: a man with a specific history that no one around him could believe, even if he told it.
What Mr. Vertigo argues, through this long life, is that the formative experience — the thing that happened when you were nine and which made you briefly extraordinary — does not explain your whole life but cannot be extracted from it either. Walt is what he became partly because a strange man in Kansas spent two years teaching him to rise above the ground. Everything that follows is lived in the knowledge of what rising felt like, and in the gradual understanding that it was not the flying itself that mattered but the discipline and the strange love that made it possible.
Our rating: 4.0/5 — Auster’s most exuberant novel, a picaresque fable about American history and the cost of talent that moves through the twentieth century with the energy of a performer who knows the act cannot last forever.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Mr. Vertigo" about?
Walt, a nine-year-old orphan on the streets of St. Louis in 1927, is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi who spends two years teaching him to levitate — and the novel follows Walt's career as a performer across the turbulent American decades from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Who should read "Mr. Vertigo"?
Readers of American literary and historical fiction; those who enjoy picaresque narratives and magical realism in a historical American setting.
What are the key takeaways from "Mr. Vertigo"?
American history is lived from the bottom — by orphans, outcasts, and performers — rather than from the top The ability to fly is a metaphor for the experience of being above ordinary circumstances while remaining attached to them Talent is not sufficient; what you do with it depends on who found you and when
Is "Mr. Vertigo" worth reading?
Auster's most picaresque novel — a magical realist fable about American history told through the life of a boy who can fly, spanning the 1920s jazz era through the Depression and beyond, full of energy and historical colour.
Ready to Read Mr. Vertigo?
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