If Jorge Luis Borges or Samuel Beckett had written at greater length and less well, the result might resemble the novels of Paul Auster. Like Borges, Auster plays the literary sleuth, fumbling through the mirrored labyrinth of a library-like universe, always on the verge of a revelation, and always suspecting that said revelation will reveal that the beguiling texts signify nothing. Like Beckett, Auster plays the literary laborer, going on because he must go on, laying on one rote-like deed, detail, and syllable after the other, always in the recognition that of all compulsive and futile endeavors, the most compulsive and futile is the crafting of words.

Such laboring gets tiresome, not as metaphor but as method. The narrator of Auster’s new novel, The Book of Illusions, describes his approach to translation — and Auster would probably agree that all writing is a kind of translation — as " a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence. . . . " A Sisyphean sentence for reader and writer both, as Auster burrows through prolixity and cliché to uncover the occasional diamonds sparkling in that coal, conceits and conundrums that can dazzle the mind and chill the soul.

The coal-shoveling description comes from David Zimmer, a character resurrected, more or less, from Auster’s Moon Palace, where he served briefly as the quixotic hero’s noodgy, studious roommate. Other familiar Auster tropes return as well, most notably the motif of sudden loss and gain — there are as many devastating losses and overwhelming inheritances in his books as in a shelf full of Dickens. An unassuming academic at a small Vermont college, David finds his tidy world laid to waste when his wife and two sons die in a plane crash. He’s equally devastated by the vast fortune he receives as a settlement from the insurance company and the airline, " the giant booby prize for random death and unforeseen acts of God. " Infinite grief, and all the time in the world to enjoy it.

He’s rescued by an unfamiliar phenomenon in Auster’s work: comedy. A few clips seen on TV from the œuvre of an obscure and fictitious silent-film clown, Hector Mann, make David laugh, and that inspires him to track down Hector’s surviving films and then write a book about them. After months of intense coal shoveling, the labor is completed. " My book had been born out of a great sorrow, " he says, " and now that the book was behind me, the sorrow was still there. " And what about the filmmaker himself, who disappeared in 1928 without a trace? " I wasn’t attracted, " David sniffs, " to mysteries or enigmas. "

The reader, however, expects no less, and here Auster disappoints. David’s book elicits a response from a woman claiming to be Hector’s wife. She tells him that the comedian is still alive and has made a number of films since his disappearance that he wants David to see. David, perversely, ignores her invitation until Alma Grund, Hector’s assistant and biographer, pays him a visit. A gun is produced, the " Go ahead and shoot " line from Casablanca is conjured — in short, they fall in love. The following day David and Alma are on the plane to David’s ranch in Arizona, and along the way, in order to allay his understandable fear of flying, Alma tells him Hector’s tale.

David’s dismissal of mystery proves well-founded; the story is the kind of melodrama that silent comedians like Hector made parodies of, involving a love triangle, madness, manslaughter, changed identities, and passages like " He didn’t want to let go of the dream of crawling into her bed every night and feeling that smooth, electric body against his naked skin, but men were responsible for their actions, and if the child was going to be born, then there was no escape from what he had done. " Fortunately, Auster doesn’t often dwell in this mode of discourse. Hector’s subsequent career in filmmaking recalls Borges’s mind-boggling story " The Secret Miracle, " not to mention the hermit painter in Auster’s Moon Palace. To atone for his sins, Hector will make movies that will never be seen. To atone for his sins, one presumes, Auster will describe and analyze these movies but will never have them made. They all sound a lot more fascinating than Auster’s own filmmaking efforts to date, which include a creepy and cold adaptation of his novel The Music of Chance, uneven scripts for Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face, and his little-seen and little-regarded directorial debut, Lulu on the Bridge.

The best parts of The Book of Illusions are the illusions themselves: David’s exegesis of Hector’s early work reads like James Agee’s essay " The Golden Age of Comedy, " and his synopsis of the filmmaker’s latter-day work The Inner Life of Martin Frost is a metaphysical romantic tragedy — one of the most brilliant movies never made. Although flawed as a novel, this book does excel as an example of a new postmodern genre — criticism of one’s own imaginary films.

Paul Auster reads on Wednesday, September 18, at 6 p.m. at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway in Harvard Square. Tickets are free and available at the Harvard Book Store. Call (617) 661-1515.