The first question on any of these posts is "why did I decide to read this one?" In the case of The New York Trilogy, it's easy to answer: it's Paul Auster's first and most famous work of fiction. Also, it's short (put together, only 314 pages) and what can I say, I like short books. After all, the sooner you can read a book, the sooner you can go on to something else, right?
The New York Trilogy is essentially a game. Each book starts as a loving, if disturbed, paean to the detective genre before spinning off into a postmodern quest for the meaning of language and the meaning of a character's actions. Auster's philosophical stance says knowing or communicating anything is impossible, therefore these quests leave the heroes in the grip of madness. At one point the hero of City of Glass writes in his notebook:
...I am supposed to do a job, one little thing, and I have said yes to it. If all goes well, it should even be quite simple. I have not been hired to understand - merely to act. This is something new. To keep it in mind, at all costs.
Unfortunately, Quinn does not keep it in mind. He is obsessed with understanding the nature of the madman Peter Stillman and in his pursuit he assumes identities, makes maps that he believes are secret messages and reads Stillman's book in a fruitless effort to get inside the man's head - eventually forfeiting his own identity to the process.
City of Glass is the most nightmarish of the trilogy. I can't spoil the various twists of the plot: suffice to say that this is a New York where anything can happen and where people often take the most inexplicable actions; where the only sane character happens to be self-satisfied and somewhat useless fellow called Paul Auster....
Ghosts is a novella set back in the forties, dealing in present tense with a detective known as Blue, hired by a man named White to watch a man named Black. The only thing is, White never gets in contact with Blue and Blue is stuck watching Black for years. For a brief moment, it seems a classic detective story is about to get going, but soon enough action is replaced with mimicry - if Black is seen reading a book, Blue will then find a copy for himself. And as this extroverted detective finds his old life vanishing behind him, and with nothing to do except watch Black sit at his desk writing every day Blue turns to introspection. An implosion is set to occur, and things really heat up when he begins breaking the rules and interacting with Black....
Lastly, there is The Locked Room, a first person narrative by a man who considers himself a talentless hack writer. Then the wife of Fanshawe, his friend from long ago, gets in touch to tell him Fanshawe has disappeared (presumed dead) and left instructions for HIM to deal with his unpublished literary legacy. The narrator steps into Fanshawe's life, publishes Fanshawe's work, marries Fanshawe's wife and adopts his son. Then there's a letter, a request for a biography and the narrator embarks on a quest to learn about the "real" Fanshawe, through eyewitness accounts. The portrait that emerges is of a brilliant, mercurial man hovering on the knife edge of madness....
There is a distinctly chilly flavour to these novels - only the final book really warms up; it's only then that the characters seem to live as something other than ciphers. I spent much of the first two stories wondering how Auster could have written something like Leviathan when he started out so callous. The character of Quinn is incredibly tragic, as is Peter Stillman the younger - yet in Auster's service, they never open up, they are merely vehicles for ideas or in Peter's case, a style of narrative. There's no heart; only brain.
In that way, The Locked Room can be considered the first mature work in Auster's fiction, the first one to tie into later works in any meaningful way. This is not exactly a criticism of the New York Trilogy - it is what it is, and that is consistently interesting. Madness and existential misery are not the only things on offer in these stories. Auster is the king of useless information and is happy to share it. So along the way you'll be treated to a whimsical dissertation of Don Quixote and far darker distortions of Milton and Carroll; you'll get a whole chapter dealing with true cases of neglected children, capped off with Kaspar Hauser; you'll learn which year it was that St. Christopher was decanonized and get a complete synopsis of the noir film Out of the Past (see below)
, not to mention the life story of Lorenzo Da Ponte. You'll swear he's making this stuff up, and the great glory is it's all true. His cabinet of curiosities is mostly for entertainment and colour, adding little by way of plot, but who needs plot on every page?
The real thing a book needs is resolution, and it's here that I have a real bone to pick with The New York Trilogy. There is no answer to any of the questions, as I may have made clear earlier. The problem is when Auster tries to link the stories together at the end by devoting one paragraph to the issue. This raises more questions than it answers and leads me to ask: was Auster trying to outfox his readers by way of a joke? What was the point of creating a character called Quinn in the third story who is obviously not the same Quinn from book one? If it was to highlight the meaningless fluidity of identity, that means The New York Trilogy had no deeper connection than shared themes, which means the attempt to connect the stories at the end is fake.
And this line of thought leads to the idea that Auster created a headscratcher to which there is no answer - meaning it likely didn't have one for him either. Which brings me round to the idea that the openended stories might stem just as much from writer's block, from him dreaming up fantastic scenarios without being able to find a satisfactory answer to questions raised - in which case he is remarkably similar to his characters and his readers, which is a touching and amusing thought. What better way to expose the failings of language than to publish a novel you just couldn't finish?
I could go on, but there's no point in doing all the thinking for you. The New York Trilogy could be considered differently by every person who reads it. Heck, my own perception has shifted just in the day it's taken me to write this. No, I don't like it as much as Leviathan, but it stands well on its own merits. Recommended.
