On Tuesday night I finished reading “The New York Trilogy” by Paul Auster. This book contains three “novels” that are all linked to one another, but not by conventional ways.
Here are the novels and their descriptions (the first two from Amazon.Com, the third by me):
City of Glass
Daniel Quinn, author of a series of detective pot-boilers, accepts an assignment as a real private investigator from a woman who dials his phone number by mistake. His mission: to keep an eye on her husband’s father, a former linguistics professor who has spent time in jail for bizarre childrearing experiments. Quinn quickly loses track of both his client and the suspect, as well as his own apartment and belongings, and finally his identity.
Ghosts
A private eye named Blue is hired by White to follow and report on Black. Blue’s problem is that Black does little more than sit at a table in his Brooklyn Heights apartment and write. Months pass and Blue can stand the non-activity no longer. He begins to intervene in Black’s life and learns that Black too is a private detective who is reporting on a man who does nothing but sit in a window and write. Finally, Blue breaks into Black’s room, beats him severely and steals his pages.
The Locked Room
The unnamed narrator is contacted by the wife of an old friend named Fanshawe, asking to meet him. It turns out that Fanshawe disappeared six month ago, and he told his wife, Sophie, should anything happen to him to contact this man. The reason: because Fanshawe wrote a few novels, a huge amount of poetry, and other things, and his wife was always pushing him to publish them. The narrators job is to read over the material and judge it’s worthiness to publish, since he is a freelance writer himself. Soon the narrator finds himself involved romantically with Sophie, searching for Fanshawe, and soon his own identity in the world.
The interesting thing about these stories is that they are mysteries, but not of the classic kind. The mystery, or the search that the main characters go on, is for their own identity. But what I found odd was that it seemed that only one actually accomplished the goal. At the end of “City of Glass”, Quinn has lost his identity. At the end of “Ghosts”, Blue has realized he lost his identity, and tries to take something of it back, but only leaves a mess. It isn’t until “The Locked Room” that we find the unnamed narrator finding himself while searching for his former friend Fanshawe, though he gets even more lost along the way.
Paul Auster
It is kind of hard to digest all of this so soon. Though not written like a horror novel, they are haunting. At times the story takes turns into more metaphysical realms that were hard to understand. But the search and the basic story made them worthwhile reads. And for my taste, thankfully the story that I liked the least, “Ghosts”, was the shortest. I liked “The Locked Room” the most, and feel that it could have actually have been longer and actually added much more to it. But it also stands pretty well on it’s own. Could possibly even be read without reading the two stories before. Other then a snicker when certain names are dropped form previous stories, though with no association to them, it could stand alone.
This was the first of Auster’s work I have read. Maybe not the best place to start, but I know this set of “novels” is his more popular. It did however stoke my interest to read more of his work.
Side note: I keep putting quotes around the word novels because these are so short. The book that contained these three was a trade paperback edition with average size typeface, yet was only 371 pages long. I wouldn’t even classify “Ghosts” as a novella, it was that short.
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