In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [The Locked Room, 1987, 116 p.]

The third in Auster’s New York trilogy, this is as awkward a read as the previous two. There is something distanced about the narration; too much is told and little is shown. It is the tale of a man effectively haunted by his childhood friend Fanshawe, who suddenly left his wife but also left behind several manuscripts and instructions to have the narrator sift through them to see if they were worth publishing, and, if so, to try to accomplish this.

That word Fanshawe is a problem, embodying the sense that what we are reading is a construct. Surely nobody ever refers to their childhood best friend by their surname? (Outside the bounds of fiction it would be unusual in any situation where referring to an acquaintance is required.) We readers know perfectly well that any short story or novel is a construct – but we don’t need our faces rubbed in it.

Though the connection seems tenuous – apart from the fact that I was reading these between the same covers – characters from the previous two books 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 know that. But to be reminded of it is annoying.)

There are some sentences where Auster’s writing climbs into wider relevance, “No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself” explores the impossibility of ever truly knowing anyone else – or even oneself. We are told “The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle” (to say goodbye to something.) If the story isn’t in the words why are we wasting our time? More problematically, one encounter leads the narrator to the thought that “Sexual desire can also be the desire to kill.”

Sensitivity note; Fanshawe’s manuscripts are said to contain “an instance of nigger-baiting.”

Pedant’s corner:- kudos, though, for no entries here.

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.

In The New York Trilogy, faber and faber, 2004. [City of Glass, 1985, 133 p.]

Well this is an odd one. A writer called Daniel Quinn using the pen-name of William Wilson to publish detective novels about an investigator named Max Work (make of that moniker what you will) receives a telephone call asking if he is Paul Auster; of the Auster Detective Agency. At first he demurs saying there is no-one of that name at that address but on a second phone call agrees to meet the caller, who is a man calling himself Peter Stillman (though he says that is not his real name) looked after by his wife, a woman at pains to point out their relationship is not sexual. Stillman moves with a certain stuntedness, like a puppet.

His story is weird; raised by his father without being spoken to to try to discover, when he does speak, what the primordial language was. The elder Stillman is about to be released from prison and the younger is convinced that when he is, he will kill his son, or at least attempt to. Quinn’s task – as Auster – will be to try to prevent this.

Noting the movements down in a red notebook, Quinn follows the older “Stillman” around the city while imagining himself to be the detective Paul Auster in order to fit the part, over paths that, when graphed, seem to trace out the outlines of letters of the alphabet: letters which Quinn eventually realises spell out “Tower of Babel”. This is after a discussion of a book about the Tower written by one Henry Dark. City of Glass displays a fascination with language then. Quinn becomes obsessed with following Stillman while slowly being immersed in the character of “Paul Auster” who is, though, in effect a nullity. “To be Auster meant being a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts.”

Where are we meant to go with all this? A book written by a man called Paul Auster with an imagined Paul Auster who doesn’t actually exist?

But there’s more. Quinn eventually meets the “real” Paul Auster and they engage in a discussion about Henry Dark and what the initials HD might stand for. Which is when we come to Humpty Dumpty; a character whose best known philosophy relates to words as meaning what he wanted them to, as if he could force them into that meaning by will alone.

They then progress into a conversation about the origins of The Adventures of Don Quixote which Cervantes claimed to have translated from Arabic to Spanish but, according to the “real” Paul Auster of the book, was made up by his friends to illuminate his delusions, then translated into Arabic, the manuscript to be found by Cervantes, in order that this reflection would cure him of his madness. But this book’s “Auster” says Cervantes wasn’t mad, only pretended to be.

In his growing obsession with “Stillman” Quinn descends into a degraded state, staying up all night in order not to avoid seeing when “Stillman” will leave his apartment and eventually losing all sense of proportion and personal hygiene.

At the end of all this I’m still not sure whether there is something relevant about City of Glass or if, instead, it’s a pile of self-indulgent tosh.

Pedant’s corner:- “Quinn could not image himself addressing a word to this person” (could not imagine himself?)

Writer Paul Auster has died.

I must admit I haven’t read any of his work but the good lady has and she was impressed, apart from one book she said had an “unnerving” ending.

Another author I ought to catch up on.

Paul Benjamin Auster: 3/2/1947 – 30/4/2024. So it goes.