Invisible by Paul Auster, Faber, £16.99, 320 pps

After a run of books with increasingly decrepit protagonists, Paul Auster's 13th novel returns to a highly recognisable 'young Auster' cipher and some metafictional gamesmanship.

Adam Walker is a literature student at Columbia. An aspiring poet, Walker is strapped for cash but avoiding his affluent parents. It's 1967, and his college ambition is to beat the draft.

This hope is one Walker lamely admits to Rudolf Born, a visiting tutor whose partner, Margot, latches on to Walker's retiring presence at a party. Born is fiery, confident and disconcerting and, with their acquaintance scarcely defrosted, offers Walker the enormous sum of $25,000 to set up a literary magazine.

This leads swiftly to prickly exchanges, political harangues, seduction and the ethical hangover of betrayal before, one evening, Born and Walker take a stroll, only to be mugged. Born reacts with a blade to the assailant's stomach. Walker runs for help but returns to find nothing: the mugger's body is found in a nearby park with a dozen wounds and, a week later, Born flees to France.

This drama closes the first section of Invisible, whose four parts each culminate in some form of flight following a shocking encounter. This goads the pace of a plot otherwise freighted with cumbersome literary baggage.

By dressing up Walker as his own younger self, Auster reinforces the sense that Invisible is another novel of storytelling and interpretation rather than narrative entertainment. Quite what Auster is seeking to reveal remains unclear: not catharsis for Walker, nor natural justice for Born; not a reappraisal of Auster's salad years. Nor does any of this yield satisfaction for the reader.