Firstly, a comment about that cover. It is gorgeous, a work by Art Spiegelman, best known as the creator of the graphic memoir Maus. I love the meta nature of the cover; the three book covers of the New York trilogy on the cover as a cover, and the cover is also one of the book covers.

The New York trilogy by Paul Auster contains three novels birthed at the end of postmodernism (1960s-1980s), meaning we get some of those (now) annoying quirks of the era: people who don’t have actual names, people lost in ennui, people removing themselves from society and pondering inward only to lose themselves, etc. I mean, it was interesting at the time. I’m sure it was brilliant at the time, but now, much of postmodernism feels more like a dry “ha ha, aren’t you clever.”

city of glass

The first novella, City of Glass, is about a writer in New York City named Daniel Quinn. Suddenly, Quinn repeatedly receives phone calls asking for Paul Auster, the detective. Quinn writes a popular detective series, so finally, Quinn gives in, says he’s Auster, and meets the client, Peter. The novella follows Quinn following his target, a odd man who picks up junk off the streets and walks in bizarre patterns. In the end, Quinn loses himself, living on the streets, sitting naked in an apartment writing in a red notebook obsessively.

There are sections that seem to encourage skimming. For instance, when Quinn meets Peter, Peter goes on and on for ages in a rambling fashion, and if you skim and catch key words, it doesn’t matter what he says. Same thing for later when Quinn is walking around the city, and the author describes every street and right turn and left turn. If you don’t know the area, it means nothing to you. They’re just street names. Why do this?

City of Glass has a plot but the whole point is to think and dig into basic philosophy, the stuff grass students eat up in seminar papers. For the average reader, City of Glass would benefit from a book club or buddy read. The writing is clear and easy to read, though you may want to stop and analyze every little thing:

At last Stillman turned to him. In a surprisingly gentle tenor voice he said, “I’m sorry, but it won’t be possible for me to talk to you.”

“I haven’t said anything,” said Quinn

“That’s true,” said Stillman. “But you must understand that I’m not in the habit of talking to strangers.”

“I repeat,” said Quinn, “that I haven’t said anything.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time. But aren’t you interested in knowing why?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well put. I can see you’re a man of sense.”

ghosts

The synopsis of Ghosts reads, “Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black.” Having everyone’s name be a color just feels like postmodernism trying to be cute. If the point is that our names are not our identities, I would suggest that people read Immobility by Brian Evanson instead. Or, check out Steve Tomasula’s book In & Oz, in which all the people are named after their jobs, suggesting that we are slaves to our jobs and that they identify us, that is, until the characters start doing the opposite of their jobs when they’re working.

Oddly, Auster seems to contradict himself in Ghosts. Blue, our detective, is someone who never thought much about anything until he is sitting in a room staring our the window at Black:

He has never given much thought to the world inside him, and though he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself. He has moved rapidly along the surface of things for as long as he can remember, fixing his attention on these surfaces only in order to perceive them, sizing up one and then passing on to the next, and he has always taken pleasure in the world as such, asking no more of things than that they be there.

While it seems like City of Glass was about a guy who knew who he was and slowly lost himself by focusing on following another person, Ghosts seems more like a guy who never really thought about who he was until he started following someone else. Weirdly, the author writes a sentence that says Blue is losing himself because he only thinks about Black. Ghosts failed to keep my interest because it was yet another novella about one man following another and ending up sitting in a room alone. Auster certainly makes a certain kind of man seem…pathetic.

the locked room

So far, the most relatable thing that I’ve read in the whole New York trilogy is this quote:

We smiled at each other again, and then I wrapped her up in a big bear hug, gave her a brief kiss on the lips, and got down the stairs as fast as I could.

I went straight home, realized that bed was out of the question, then spent two hours in front of the television, watching a movie about Marco Polo. I finally conked out at around four, in the middle of a Twilight Zone rerun.

Although The Locked Room is also about a person doing detective work, it had a whole plot running through it that made the more philosophical and postmodern elements more interesting, as if they were running on all cylinders. Two boys grow up together, best friends, until they grow apart in young adulthood. Our unnamed narrator receives a note saying his old buddy, Fanshawe, has disappeared, and can help help the wife and baby left behind? The narrator easily slides into Fanshawe’s old life, replacing the missing man. The crux is that the wife wants Fanshawe to be dead, even if he isn’t dead, because the remains of her lost husband, as the years go by, create rift in her family. Meanwhile, our narrator has been tasked with publishing the literature Fanshawe left behind, which is bought and sells well. They cannot be rid of Fanshawe, even as his royalty checks keep the family afloat. As the childhood best friend, the narrator is pushed into writing a biography of Fanshawe, and as he does, the secret of what happened to our missing writer digs a wound in the narrator’s soul that keeps him from an honest relationship with is wife.

Again, Auster pushes the postmodernism, to the detriment of the story. Randomly, the narrator acknowledges two books that exist in this trilogy, which adds nothing to The Locked Room:

The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.

And though our narrator is Fanshawe’s best friend, sometimes we get this other narrator, one who sounds like Auster? It doesn’t make sense or add anything. Sadly, The Locked Room contains quite a bit of the narrator feeding his sexual needs that are dreamlike, from his perspective, when his wife isn’t around and making implied excuses, such as the lingering presence of Fanshawe drove him to it.

Overall, these novellas felt more like that vibe you get in “important literature” in which the male professor is sleeping with his students, which Auster didn’t need to do to make his point about the identity of man. In fact, James Dickey did it better, and without throwing women under the bus, in Deliverance.

books of winter ⛄❄️🎄

• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
• This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
• Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
• Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
• The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
• The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9) (finished — special review forthcoming at a later date)
• The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz (DNF)
• At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck (DNF)
• Touched by Kim Kelly (paused)
• After Life by Andrew Neiderman
• The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
• Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• All of Me by Venise Berry
• Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
• Awakened by Laura Elliott