The Locked Room

I read this work with such fascination that I somehow forgot my daily work- routine and was lost in it, beginning to end. It is a remarkable piece of work. Like the first work of the trilogy 'City of Glass' it seems to me to reach the higher levels of Literary Creation. The book is about two friends , the narrator and Fanshawe. Fanshawe has disappeared and after six months his wife, Sophia( Hawthorne is in this story beginning to end. Hawthorne's wife is Sophia Peabody, and Fanshawe a character of his fiction) contacts his childhood best and only friend . She does this not in the hope of finding her husband, but because she needs an evaluation of the ' writing' Fanshawe has left behind. Fanshawe made no effort to publish in his lifetime. Her secret motive is to break out of her loneliness, and in the ensuing action the inevitable will happen and she and the writer- friend will fall in love, love and marry. The writer- narrator will become the adopted father of the child who she was pregnant with when Fanshawe abandoned her. There is a most moving description of the childhood friendship. There is also the fascinating story of Fanshawe's family( The father who died of cancer, the sister dependent on Fanshawe who went mad perhaps because of him) and the mother who it turns out hates her son. There is a surprising remeeting between the writer- friend and Fanshawe's mother in which their mutual resentment and hatred for Fanshawe is motive to an illicit vengeful act of physical love which is in fact an act of physical hate. The description of the literary success of the presumed dead Fanshawe, of the misguided effort of the narrator- friend to write a Fanshawe biography(And the effect of this on his marriage) are also parts of the story. I will stop telling or badly retelling the main story of the book to simply say the following about Auster and this work. I found this work as I have said a work of the highest quality and interest. Auster's capacity to surprise is one element of his great gift as a storyteller. There are in his work often, small stories within stories, which in themselves are worth the price of the volume. His retelling here for instance the life or the five or six different lives of Lorenzo da Ponte Mozart's librettist for his operas illustrates Austerian principles about life perfectly . As Auster sees it we are involved in an endless game of chance which means our lives continually surprise us. It also means by implication that our lives are mysteries which are never fully solved, even by ourselves. Auster is a great craftsman of plot and character surprise and re- invention. Fanshawe the main character of this work is allegedly locked inside himself, a mystery even to himself. His mother however accuses him of a tremendous coldness, of an inability to truly connect to or love anyone else. She commends the writer- narrator for his loving relation to his mother. Obviously his ability to love, to truly care for another is what ena

This is the third and last volume of New York Trilogy. Just as the book titles have little to do with what the books are about so does the overall title. This is the story of a man's search for himself and loosing those parts of himself that he doesn't like. Auster has used himself for many parts of the protagonists, and has split his personality into many personae. At one point in this book, two of those personae get into a fight, adding a totally new dimension to the expression, "don't beat up on yourself", or maybe I just imagined it. Many of the characters from the first book "City of Glass" wander through this part, but in most cases they are very different from the them we met before. As noted in his biography, many of the actions and occurances that happen to the narrator are directly out of Auster's life. It is intriguing to try and guess where reality ends and fantasy begins or vice versa. It's so tempting at this part of the review to want to fall into Auster's style and say something that is mid-way between the profane and the profound; and maybe I just did. But who can say what is real and what is an illusion; Auster's book is not to be taken too literally, but it's not as superficial as you would expect on first glance. Make of it what you will.