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. [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?)