The Book of Illusions

A very smart and well-read friend of mine, Bob Nye, said that Paul Auster was one of his favorite authors because he was able to capture dialogue so well. This came up as part of a ranging conversation about books we had been reading, favorite authors, etc. So I checked into this Auster guy and turns out he has written LOTS of books and that our local public library had lots of them on the shelf. The Book of Illusions is about the disappearance of a silent film comedian, Hector Mann, in the late 1920's and about the academic, who, in contemporary times, took on a critical review of the comedies Mann made. David had recently lost his wife and sons in an airplane crash and was pretty certain he was going to drink himself to death; then one late night, in a drunken stupor, he happened to see a snippet of one of Mann's films on TV and it made him laugh--something he had not done in months and that he thought he would never do again. Having come into insurance money from the deaths of his family members--he was already on leave from his college teaching job--he undertook to find all the silent films Hector Mann ever made and eventually wrote a book about them. Some months after the book's publication, he receives a note in the mail, ostensibly from the wife of the same Hector Mann who was presumed dead all these years. Is it a hoax? There are stories within stories throughout this novel and indeed Auster is a master craftsman at writing. You will never fault him on style or structure and his prose is very readable. But these characters didn't move me in the sense of coming alive or evoking my sympathy or walking off the page. I may give another of Auster's books a try. He is a critically acclaimed author, after all, and I certainly respect my friend's opinion, so I should give him a second chance...not sure which one it should be, though...any recommendations?