The New York Trilogy

(by Paul Auster)

Detective stories are generally about a protagonist figuring something out: a detective solving a crime, catching a criminal, figuring out the “how” or “why” of some mysterious event. But the three novellas in The New York Trilogy aren’t that kind of detective story: indeed, only one of them features a protagonist who is a private investigator by trade. Characters find things out in these novellas, but plenty of mysteries remain—and the central events and emotions of the plot aren’t tied to protagonists to finding things out but rather to protagonists losing themselves, by chance or fate, in something totally unexpected.

In “City of Glass,” Daniel Quinn is a writer of crime novels who finds himself acting as an investigator on a whim, after he picks up a wrong-number phone call where the caller is looking for a detective named Paul Auster. In “Ghosts,” Blue is actually an investigator, but finds his life changed when he takes a job that isn’t what he expected at all. And in “The Locked Room,” the narrator is a writer who finds himself unexpectedly serving as the literary executor for a childhood friend who’s disappeared—and whose life also changes radically as a result of the mystery he finds himself involved with. I think “Ghosts” was maybe my favorite of the three, followed by “City of Glass” and then “The Locked Room,” but each one is interesting, and I like the presence of New York throughout, how various characters walk through the city (which “City of Glass” describes as “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps”). One character sits outside in Brooklyn Heights at “the twilight hour of slow changes, of glowing bricks and shadows”; another character looks up at the sky above Manhattan and we get this: “Even on cloudless days, when the blue seemed to be everywhere, there were constant little shifts, gradual disturbances as the sky thinned out and grew thick, the sudden whitenesses of planes, birds, and flying papers.”

I also loved a page-long list that a character makes of blue things, white things, black things (this makes more sense in context, sort of, but it also feels like an excuse for Paul Auster to have written a very satisfying list that makes me think of Sei Shōnagon, and I do generally love lists). I think this is the first thing I’ve ever read by Auster, but I don’t think it will be the last.