A testament to how fine a writer Paul Auster is that, even though he made his reputation as a leading American postmodernist, he always has seemed more ingenious than merely clever -- and never without a purpose.

Now 60 and with a dozen novels behind him, Auster seems to have returned to his metaphysical roots with this story that ruminates on identity, purpose, responsibility and knowledge in a setting that harks to French existentialist conventions.

		"TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM" By Paul Auster Holt ($22)

His aging protagonist, Mr. Blank, awakes in a spare, cell-like room. On the room's desk is an unfinished manuscript, which Blank is instructed to read and, ultimately, to finish.

It might be a report or a work of fiction, the account of an imagined America and its conflict with "primitives" who might be American Indians ... or perhaps not.

Visitors float in and out of Blank's locked room -- nurses, a doctor, a policeman -- and make suggestions about his possible identity, his possible complicity in crimes, or perhaps those of some other person.

He could be a former spymaster, or a writer or character in somebody else's report or fiction, or both.

The final sequence provides a resolution that will strike some readers as clarifying and others as a rare loss of authorial nerve by a masterful writer.

Certain postmodern conventions are observed. Readers familiar with Auster's work, for example, will recognize characters from "The New York Trilogy," "In the Country of Last Things," "Moon Palace," "Leviathan" and "Oracle Night."

But something else is at work here. As Blank reads the account of the conflict between the nation called the "Confederation" and the "Primitives," he muses, "What better way to unite the people than to invent a common enemy and start a war?"

It is possible to read the entire narrative as a fable on the fate of this nation's detainees in places such as Guantanamo or the CIA's secret prison network.

It also is possible to read it as an homage to the modernist master in whose shadow Auster always has worked, Samuel Beckett. Blank and the Irish Nobel laureate's heartbreakingly comedic character Krapp have more than a little in common.

More than 20 years ago, Auster wrote: "The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell."

In "Travels in the Scriptorium," Auster subtly invokes the humane authority of Beckett, then elegantly withdraws, respectfully presuming the artfulness of his readers.

They may choose to read this elegant little book as an allegory of their country's current predicament, as a writerly conceit, or as a wider comment on the modern condition ... perhaps all those things -- or something else.