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I was away for the weekend with my church, and so I thought what better what to efficiently cover off three titles for A Book A Day In May than with a trilogy in one paperback? I was also chatting to my friend Tom recently, who has been reading the graphic novel versions of The New York Trilogy, and his descriptions of the original novels were enough to intrigue me. Clearly I’d been intrigued enough already to buy a copy in 2019, but it might have languished on my shelves indefinitely without that final push.

The New York Trilogy consists of three novels – City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986) – but you’ll almost invariably find them put together into this trilogy. They are totally separate novellas (well, so we presume for most of the time), but they are consistently, delicately, mysteriously interwoven – well, ‘interwoven’ feels too closely connected. Rather, they comment on each other by sheer proximity, and while you could disentangle any one from the others, there is a richness that comes from considering them as a whole.

It always feels strange to write about a book so well-known – though the sparseness of the Wikipedia page does make me question if I really am the last person to read them. They have been described as postmodernist takes on detective fiction, but if that description leaves you cold then fear not. I found this trilogy extraordinary – exactly the right amount of cleverness, so we are relish it alongside the author, rather than feeling alienated by it.

Ok, Simon, but what are they actually about? Let’s start with City of Glass. Daniel Quinn writes detective fiction under the name William Wilson. One day, he gets a telephone call asking if he is Paul Auster (!) – and he decides to assume that name to meet with Peter Stillman and his wife, to investigate the future murder of Peter Stillman by his father (since Peter Stillman is sure that his father will soon kill him). Along the way, Quinn-as-Auster also adopts the name of the detective he writes. The slippage of identity is a key theme of all three novellas, but particularly City of Glass. The person you pretend to be, or the person you are assumed to be, is elevated to a level of power that destabilises your own identity.

As he wandered through the station, he reminded himself of who he was supposed to be. The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was not altogether unpleasant. Although he still had the same body, the same mind, the same thoughts, he felt as though he had somehow been taken out of himself, as if he no longer had to walk around with the burden of his own consciousness. By a simple trick of the intelligence, a deft little twist of naming, he felt incomparably lighter and freer. 

Quinn starts shadowing the suspect, gradually losing his grip on reality. Adopting different identities is a key component of much detective and mystery fiction, of course, but Auster lifts it from its usually functionality in a novel – because it is usually done in order to get more information to convey to the reader, or to accelerate the revelation that comes at the end of the novel. In City of Glass, these sorts of disguises might bring more revelation, in terms of examining Quinn’s multi-layered psyche, but they certainly don’t remove ambiguity. There is no ultimate revelation here. We are taught to find our satisfaction in an entirely different mode from most novels with a detective.

What makes Auster so good is the quality of his writing – and what makes it so refreshing is that he isn’t playing needless games with it. So much postmodern fiction ends up being convoluted and self-indulgent. Or, even if we are being more charitable, the style is co-opted as part of the postmodernism: it intends to confuse, or blur the boundaries between reality and irreality, or highlight the fictionality of what you are reading. In City of Glass, he lets all of those fascinating things come through character and plot. The writing is just very good, engaging, with a simple lyricism. The sole example of the style itself being used to wrongfoot us is in Peter Stillman the Younger’s dialogue – which reads like a Beckett play:

“So I am telling you about the father. It is a good story, even if I do not understand it. I can tell it to you because I know the words. And that is something, is it not? To know the wards, I mean. Sometimes I am so proud of myself! Excuse me. This is what my wife says. She says the father talked about God. That is a funny word to me. When you put it backwards, it spells dog. And a dog is not much like God, is it? Woof woof. Bow wow. Those are dog words. I think they are beautiful. So pretty and true. Like the words I make up.”

One novella in, I was already hooked. The second novella is rather shorter than the other two (which worked very well for me, as the only full day I was away, with a busy timetable). I don’t have much to say about Ghosts, to be honest. It is also about a private eye (Blue) who is paid by White to investigate Black. Other characters are called Brown, Green, Rose, Gray… you get the idea. There is, incidentally, a lovely call-back to this naming in the final novella. A lot of the things I admired and enjoyed in City of Glass were also present in Ghosts, but to me it felt like a less ambitious and less successful version of the earlier novella.

And, finally, The Locked Room. On the surface of it, this is the most straightforward of the three. The unnamed narrator is a writer who hasn’t amounted to his ambitions – but discovers that his childhood best friend, Fanshawe, has abandoned his wife (in each novella, someone walks out of their life completely) and left behind suitcases of manuscripts. The narrator knew that Fanshawe had written as a teenager, but didn’t realise how diligently he had continued – or how brilliant he was. The narrator becomes as a sort of agent for the absent Fanshawe, to the extent that some people believe he is the author of the resultant novels, poetry, and plays. He also falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife and adopts his son, so that their lives begin to merge – but then Fanshawe writes to the narrator.

Towards the close of the novella, we realise how it relates to the other two – particularly to the first. But, before that, it offers a clearer example of what a talented writer Auster is. Without the same level of identity trickeries of the first two novellas, we can simply admire the storytelling, the prose, the exploration of character. The title The Locked Room obviously refers to a classic subset of detective fiction – but we are told that the locked room is the mind.

There are a couple of telling moments, offered as conclusions. ‘In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose’ – and ‘In the end, each life is irreducible to anything other than itself’. They are the narrator’s conclusions rather than the author’s, of course, but they are also clearly untrue in the crafting of a novel. A crafted work of fiction is not chance, and every life portrayed must be reduced, truncated, into a synecdochal whole. Subtly – more subtly than most postmodernist works I’ve read – Auster sews a seam of self-awareness: this is a novella, but no novella can achieve the aim of portraying reality. It can only succeed by acknowledging its limitations.

I was often reminded of Milan Kundera, my favourite postmodernist writer, particularly in the way unusual anecdotes, historical figures, and other famous works of fiction are referenced and incorporated into a sort of intertextual patchwork. Sometimes the link between the tangent and the story isn’t clear (e.g. the man sent to starve on an island, rescued, then eaten on a drifting ship when he drew the shortest straw) – at others time, they are engaged with directly by the characters: Paul Auster (the character, rather than the author) is writing about Don Quixote; Peter Stillman The Older is obsessed with the Tower of Babel. I’d say that Auster does postmodernism in the least showy possible way. You could easily read these novellas – particularly the first and last – simply for the pleasure of the stories and characters, and not worry too much about the literary trickery. But the two elements merge together beautifully, making these novellas enjoyable to read with an added exhiliration from Auster’s intellectual playfulness. I loved the experience, join others in mourning his death last year, and look forward to reading more by him. Anywhere I should look first?