Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is a collection of three novellas that are just barely connected enough that I would call this one novel, although it certainly bends the boundaries of the form. Each part starts out as a detective story, but turns into something else entirely, exploring questions of identity and meaning, with the three protagonists devolving into madness as their “cases” go awry. The work appears on the Guardian‘s 2003 list of the hundred greatest novels ever written, which is the only reason I even knew of its existence.
The first novella, City of Glass, covers a writer named Daniel Quinn who works under a pseudonym, William Wilson, about a detective named Max Work. Quinn gets a strange call one night asking for the detective Paul Auster, and after dismissing the first call, receives another one a few nights later and decides to play along, pretending to be Auster and taking on the case, which involves protecting a young man, Peter Stillman, from his abusive father as the latter is about to be released from prison. Peter speaks in a unique, stilted fashion, the result of the abuse his father, who was gripped by a sort of religious mania, put him through. Quinn decides to take the job, following the father, also named Peter Stillman, from Grand Central Station on the day of his release to the flophouse where he settles, eventually forcing a meeting with the older man, while also tracking down Paul Auster, the writer (not a detective), who is working himself on an article on the narrator character of Don Quixote. Quinn assumes the identity of the Auster-detective and goes undercover to an absurd extent, such that the case gets away from him and he begins to lose his own sense of self.
Ghosts, the shortest of the three acts, covers a detective named Blue, who is hired by the unseen White to stake out a target named Black. Every character has a color for his/her name – sometimes just part of the name, sometimes that’s all we get – but Blue, like Quinn in the first story, veers off the path, as he finds that watching Black day in and day out seems increasingly pointless, and eventually he decides to try to stalk White and find out what the purpose of the assignment is. It doesn’t go well, as you might imagine.
Postmodern with metafictional elements, The New York Trilogy plays with layers of reality to push the three protagonists through varying levels of internal and external rebellion, against their senses of self and against the perception that they lack free will in a universe that is forcing action upon them. Blue and the nameless narrator both try to find the scriptwriters directing their lives. Quinn, himself an author, is presented with an entirely new script, but becomes obsessed with its narrative to the point that he completely loses himself, as if he’s playing a role that consumes him. In all three stories, Auster gives us less-than-reliable narrators and causes to doubt whether the antagonists or their backstories are real. Even when he unites the three narratives in the last few pages of The Locked Room (with a few scattered hints before that), the truth remains ambiguous – it’s possible that the stories all share a character, or that a character from one story created one of the others. It’s a work that asks questions without answering them, but still manages to grab the reader with the detective-novel paradigm and determination (if not entirely hinged) of its lead characters. I’m a devoted fan of noir detective fiction; this might be more gris than noir, but it works well with its foundation.
Next up: I’m reviewing out of order, but I’m currently on Frederik Pohl’s Hugo & Nebula Award-winning novel Gateway.
