Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
The New York Trilogy presents a triptych: three stories which can be read independently but are connected to each other in several ways, such as recurring characters (or at least recurring characters’ names), the claim of authorship for all three by the narrator of the last story, or again the fact that they imitate and then depart from the structure of the detective novel. Maybe Auster, like Quinn from City of Glass, wanted to write a novel where "everything becomes essence, the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end."
The first story, City of Glass, tells the story of Quinn, a lonely writer who writes detective stories under the pseudonym of William Wilson, and whose life is turned around after he is mistaken for a detective named Paul Auster. Quinn, out of curiosity and boredom, decides to pass himself for Auster, and accepts to help his client, a man named Peter Stillman. Stillman was locked in a room for years as a child, and now, an adult with many behavioral and linguistic problems, fears that his father (who locked him because he believed that in isolation, his son would forget English and remember the prelapsarian language of God) will come back to kill him. Quinn follows Stillman Sr., and in the process progressively loses everything: his apartment, his sanity, and of course, his sense of identity, which was not very strong to begin with…
The second story, Ghosts, is about a detective, Blue, who is hired by White to follow a man named Black. He works from an apartment facing Black’s, and spends his time spying on him. Unfortunately, Black does nothing except write, eat, sleep and take the occasional stroll. Blue becomes bored and starts to ask himself many disquieting questions: What if Black is spying on somebody else? What if he is spying on him? Who is really White and is he Black’s accomplice? Blue progressively becomes paranoid until the ultimate plunge into madness, and his watch of Black also becomes a look into his own self: "For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself."
The third story, The Locked Room, is my favorite. The narrator talks about Fanshawe, a man who used to be his best friend, and who one day disappeared, leaving Sophie, his pregnant wife, behind. Fanshawe, who was a writer, is presumed dead, and had previously instructed his wife to trust all his writings (which he had chosen not to publish before) to the narrator, who will make the final decision about their fate. The narrator has Fanshawe’s works published, falls in love with Sophie, and after some weeks, receives a letter from Fanshawe, who is not dead after all. He wants his friend to consider him dead and marry Sophie, and forbids him to try to find him. The narrator quickly complies and adopts Ben, Sophie’s son, in the process, not mentioning Fanshawe’s letter to her. But he is unable to put him out of his mind, and becomes haunted by him. Once he accepts to write his biography, his obsession with Fanshawe turns to hatred, threatening his family, his sanity, and even his life. The Locked Room ties the three stories together, not surprisingly raising more questions than it provides definite answers. As the narrator says when he reads Fanshawe’s red notebook: "He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again."
All three stories present quests that are doomed from the start. "These three stories are finally the same story" as their claimed author, the narrator of The Locked Room explains. "[...] each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don’t claim to have solved any problems" he adds. In a detective story, the detective usually finds all there is to find about a case, tying loose ends impeccably. Auster shows us that in real life, or at least in Auter’s literary world, such satisfying closure is impossible, for as much as we think we know someone, we know in fact nothing. As the narrator of The Locked Room says: "Every life is inexplicable [...]. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling." Eventually, he goes on, we realize that not only don’t we know anybody else but neither do we know ourselves: "We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimpse of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself." Therefore each of the characters in the novel knows a devastating crisis of identity, each of them feels his own self getting melted with another’s or disintegrating almost completely. As writers or detectives (which ultimately amounts to the same thing), as well as a crisis of identity, the characters from the stories discover the fragile nature of language, of the words they thought they possessed, and whose arbitrariness and ultimate inadequacy they begin to discover. They start to question "what it means when a writer puts his name on a book, why some writers chose to hide behind a pseudonym, whether or not a writer has a real life anyway"…
Auster’s New York Trilogy is an excellent book, all his usual themes (chance, fate, unpredictability of life, crises of identity, illusion vs. reality) are exploited, the writing is fluid, as usual, and the numerous references to other authors (Milton, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cervantes, etc.), make it a very rich and literary tapestry. I found the part about Peter Stillman Sr.’s book The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World in City of Glass particularly inventive and ingenious. As in other books, Auster includes biographical elements, and even appears as a character in City of Glass…
The New York Trilogy is another great Paul Auster’s book…
Rating: 4,5/5
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment