Ghosts by Paul Auster
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 30 January 2025
In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [Ghosts, 1986, 64 p.]
I read Ghosts, the second part of Auster’s New York trilogy, in September and thought I had published my review here but I was seeking to link to it in my review of the third in his sequence and couldn’t find it when I searched the blog; so it seems I didn’t. So here it is, four months late.
In 1947 New York a man called Blue is employed by a man named White to spy on a man called Black, and write regular reports on him. Blue cancels his date with the future Mrs Blue to undertake the commission – a commission which will keep him going for months. (To the understandable frustration of his intended who when they next meet on the street berates him for the lack of contact. But by then she has moved on. Not that Blue can, though he had pondered getting in touch but decided against it on the grounds that “The man must always be the stronger one.”)
Everything has been set up for Blue with an apartment across the street from which he can monitor Black’s activities. All Black appears to do though is write. And read.
It is a curious and distancing feature of the book that except for the real life people mentioned, such as Washington Roebling and Jackie Robinson, every character’s name is a colour. As well as Blue, White and Black we also have Gray, a bartender named Red, another called Green. The only woman who is given a name here (the future Mrs Blue isn’t) is called Violet. I note that that is a first name whereas the men’s in this story are not.
Blue becomes so bogged down in his task that he wonders if White and Black are one and the same and if he himself is being followed. The paranoia of a man who is so focused on what he is doing that he loses touch with reality? This has echoes of the previous book in Auster’s trilogy, City of Glass. Eventually Blue goes beyond his remit, contacts Black and tries to find out who White is.
In a discussion of Hawthorne, Black says to Blue, “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.” Blue replies, “Another ghost.”
The narrative is peppered with references to magazine stories, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially where a man took off on a whim and only years later (after being presumed dead) returned to his house and wife and knocked on the door. Whereupon the story ends. In that sense Ghosts reflects it. It doesn’t end so much as stop, albeit with being seen from a perspective of thirty years later.
What is Auster trying to do here? Is he subverting the detective story? Demonstrating the inexplicability of existence?
Ghosts is easy enough to read, and short at only 64 pages, but it all seems a bit pointless.
Tags: Ghosts, Literary Fiction, Paul Auster, US fiction
The Locked Room by Paul Auster – A Son of the Rock -- Jack Deighton
5 February 2025 at 23:07
[…] in the trilogy like Quinn and Stillman, reappear here. And the narrator mentions City of Glass and Ghosts as if he is the same as the person who wrote those. (Of course he is. He’s Paul Auster. And we […]