The novels that make up Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy are notable for their brevity, inclusion of relatively extraneous material, and chronicling the main character’s disintegration. In each of the three, the detector (a mystery writer enrolled as a detective, a detective watching a writer, and a writer trying to find his childhood friend who has made him his literary executor) becomes obsessed, his previous life cracking up.

In the last (The Locked Room) he recovers. In the middle one (Ghosts) he perhaps kills his quarry. In the first (City of Glass) he is cared for after his dissolution (suggesting that in all three, the detector is engaged by his quarry, though in the first one it remains unclear whether the wife is an agent for her father-in-law who is tailed by Quinn).

Auster’s detectives’ remorseless quest for answers destroys their lives: All the questioning makes them implode. (Do answers exist outside books? Having been reading Leonardo Sciascia, I have ceased to expect solutions to mysteries even in books!)

Auster’s detectives (and, surely, Auster himself) are very concerned with inscription: the notebook of the first, both the reports of surveillance and what Black is writing in the second, the texts Fanshawe left behind and the biography of him that never gets written in the third. Auster seems to be a postmodernist who believes in the lives of authors. (unraveling Don Quixote, recalling incidents in the life of Walt Whitman, disquisitions on Hawthorne and an unliterary reader’s reading of Walden; the characters of The Locked Room have names from Hawthorne and enact a variant of the Hawthorne story related in Ghosts. (He also manages to tell the story of “Out of the past” and work in a Brooklyn Dodger game from Jackie Robinson’s first season and to use many names of former New York Mets players for his characters.)

Is it metafiction? (Metamystery?) Or a very literature-obsessed writer playing with the mystery genre? Probably some of both. Epistemological mysteries. The most explicit statement of ultimate unknowability is: “We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times, even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our incoherence.” (p. 368).

Ghosts irritated me and I almost didn’t read the last and best of the three novels as a result. Its aftertaste is better than its taste while chewing (reading) it. The Locked Room seems less coolly stylized, with less abstract characters.

Fanshawe has many experiences from Auster’s life (as revealed in his recent account of making money to write). The super boy idealized by all, he is eventually indicted for lacking heart. Inhuman is not how even the coolest Auster prose strikes me. I don’t think that he lacks compassion, but I have to think that he is concerned about lacking feeling. Not just in cannibalizing life in writing but in being incapable of love. Admittedly, this is reading a lot into the book. A fear of cracking up from observing too closely would be a more obvious moral of all three.




Recommended: Yes