Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Schuyler are among the cherished few writers who admit that failure is the foundation of their art. Paul Auster has now joined their company. Hand to Mouth - a three-dimensional palimpsest as uncanny as David Lynch's Lost Highway - is the most unusual autobiography I've ever read. That Auster, in his prime, should choose to publish "a chronicle of early failure" shows not that he takes his present success for granted, ...