The New York Trilogy: City of Glass/Ghosts/The Locked Room

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is one of the finest books I've read in a long while; it's riveting. Auster is one of my favorite writers, and for those new to his writing The New York Trilogy is a good place to start.Essentially, these three novellas are detective stories with film-noir atmosphere, but the themes Auster tackles go beyond those of your standard spy novel. There are questions of identity, power dynamics, the relationship between the writer and his characters, the relationship between a detective and his suspects. Additionally, this is a wonderfully bookish book; references to Lewis Carroll, Cervantes, etc. abound. There are books within books within books; all the lines that separate reality from writing from fictional reality from fictional writing are blurred, turning the reader inside-out and upside-down as he or she reads.Most importantly, these novellas are highly engaging and evocative. Though Auster's writing has been described as cold and austere, these are compelling stories; it is easy succumb to the swift, gripping narrative. A truly lovely collection, very conceptual, breaks all the rules and wriggles its way out of any genre to which one might try to confine it.

Now that the academic and critic types have found Paul Auster, I guess he'll be lifted out of the general readership and stashed with the rest of the classics on some hoity-toity shelf. Once that "postmodern" labelling starts, it's goodbye accessibility, hello pretension.... Anyway: City of Glass is one of the best constructed stories I've ever read. There is an incredibly complex concentric circle of narrators: there's the author, then the narrator, then his pen name, then his detective character, then his pose as Paul Auster. Then there's the real Paul Auster he meets, not to be confused with the one who's writing the book. Kind of spooky. Also, an English woman once showed me more disturbing information about City of Glass. If you take a city map of New York and mark out the well-described twisting journey of the characters, a picture emerges. What does it mean? With so much description of the streets they travelled, it can't be accidental. I was actually spooked. Unfortunately, I think everything Auster's written since this trilogy has been sliding downhill in quality, and this opinion seems to be shared by friends all around.

Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy" consists of three seemingly unconnected novellas which though complete in themselves should be read as integral parts of a total literary experience. Unlike a conventional mystery thriller which focuses on the "who done what to whom" aspect of the storyline, Auster turns the table on the reader by taking him on a journey of self discovery past a hall of mirrors which reflect and expose by stages the psyche of the pursuer, not the pursued. The effect is so spooky you want to scream in your head as you encounter the next slice of reality about yourself. Readers familiar with the music of rock star David Bowie will find the reading experience similar to that of listening to his 1977 album "Low", a dark and creepy introspective piece of work. All three vignettes deal with questions of identity, reality and illusion, the meaning of words and language and explores the fine line between commitment and obsession. Both Quinn in "City of Glass" and the anonymous narrator in "Ghosts" are trapped in their own circumstances and forced to make human choices which lead to their mental breakdown. There is also a noir-like cinematic feel about the trilogy that just begs for this masterful piece of work to be brought to the screen. Auster has produced a highly original post-modern thriller that will mesmerise and enthrall readers for years to come. It is simply superb and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

This trilogy of novels, or two novellas and a short story, as it should rightly be called, should be made essential reading for 1. Anyone travelling to New York in the near future, and 2. Anyone who would like to feel free of the realist grip that most literary fiction has been in, with some periods of upheaval, for far too long now. Auster makes the term 'post-modern' reader-friendly; after all, what is wrong with the author referring to himself as a fictitious character within his or her own work (even when he goes as far as introducing you to his home and meeting his wife)? This Auster does on various occasions in these loosely linked pseudo detective fictions, cramming in themes and obsessions such as the impulse to tell stories (within stories) and to get away from modern life, Hamsun-like, to go back to the roots of nature and language. But it's not done in any way that could be called pretentious. Auster is not interested in describing human features or writing two paragraphs (or six) on how a room looks; he is more interested in drawing parallels and trying to fix why something is where it is. Identity is his main concern, and within the parabola of his narrow range of reference points (Paris, the native American legacy, working on ships, New York, coincidences) he twists and turns with it as dexterously as Borges. Suffice to say that the three stories involve coincidence and searches passim. The initial story, City of Glass, about a writer who becomes a detective on an infuriating mission to find a man for a woman after a misdialled telephone call, appears again in the other stories both as himself and as a reflection of other characters engaged in looking for other mysterious characters. The point of the middle story, Ghosts, only becomes clear when you get to the end of the last, The Locked Room, by which time you have to go back and read the whole thing again (with pleasure). In the meantime you've been taken on the kind of existential, mythical journey that dignifies detective fiction well beyond its seeming limitations. It's fascinating to read how Auster has consistently used his real-life experiences (not all that exceptional on the face of it), to create such compulsive fiction, and you can get a lot of this from his autobiography, Hand To Mouth. It was inevitable that he would move into film-making one day, and his Lulu On The Bridge, has not disappointed (Smoke and Blue in The Face were worthy apprenticeships which he mainly scripted and had some directorial involvment in).Probably even better than NYT are Moon Palace and Leviathan.