I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.
Auster refused to pare his ideas to one story.
So: he wrote three.
City Of Glass
Quinn writes mystery novels under the pseudonym William Wilson. One night, he receives a phone call intended for the private detective Paul Auster. He pretends to be Auster and accepts the case.
Many years ago, a man named Peter Stillman locked his infant son in a room for more than ten years as part of a psychological experiment based on a wingnut theory about the Tower of Babel and universal language. Unhappy with the results, he set the house on fire. His son was saved and Peter Stillman went to prison.
Stillman is released and it is Quinn's job to protect the son – also named Peter Stillman (maybe) – from his father. Quinn tails Peter Stillman, Sr. as he wanders aimlessly around the city, picking up trash. More than once, Quinn engages Stillman, claiming to be Henry Dark or his son Peter. He researches Stillman's work, invents patterns in Stillman's wanderings and records it all in a red notebook. When Stillman, Sr. disappears, Quinn stakes out Stillman, Jr.'s residence to protect him. Refusing to abandon his post, Quinn barely eats, rarely sleeps, doesn't bathe or shave and slowly loses his mind. When Peter Stillman, Jr. disappears too, Quinn reaches out to the real Paul Auster, who turns out to be the author Paul Auster and not the private detective Paul Auster and is unable to help. Quinn enters the Stillman's abandoned residence and finishes filling his red notebook before disappearing himself. Paul Auster finds the notebook and gives it to an unnamed individual who is the fictional author of City Of Glass.
Ghosts
White hires the private detective Blue to watch Black through the window of his building. Day after day, Black sits at a desk, reads and writes in a notebook. Blue watches him, tails him whenever he leaves and writes a daily report that he delivers by post to White. Black and Blue are mirrors of each other and – to the detriment of Blue's fragile psyche – their identities merge. Frustrated with his job and unsure of his employer's motives, Blue begins wearing disguises to talk to Black. White writes Blue to back off but Blue sneaks into Black's room and steals some of his papers. To his dismay, the pages he recovers are his own. He returns to Black's room and discovers Black is really White. Black/White wears a mask, wields a gun and threatens to kill himself and Blue. Blue struggles with White, overpowers him, beats him unconscious, takes all his writings and leaves. He returns to his room, reads his own story and provides its ending by leaving the room.
The Locked Room
Fanshawe disappears. A private detective named Quinn declares him dead after a lengthy, fruitless investigation. Obeying Fanshawe's wishes, his widow entrusts a friend with a closet full of unpublished writings. Being a writer himself, he recognizes his late friend's literary genius and publishes his novels and poems posthumously to critical acclaim. He marries Fanshawe's widow and adopts his son. One day, he receives a letter from Fanshawe – who is alive! – thanking him for taking care of his wife and son and warning him to never try to find him. Ignoring the request, he proposes to write a book about Fanshawe's life and uses his research into Fanshawe's past as a ruse to track his movements. In Paris, he loses his mind but finds a man named Peter Stillman whom he believes to be Fanshawe and suffers a beating at his hands that brings him to his senses. He returns to his wife and receives another letter: this time Fanshawe wants to meet. At a vacant house, he has locked himself in a room with a gun and threatens to kill himself and anyone who enters. He reveals the mystery of his missing years and delivers a red notebook to his friend which he says is the culmination of his work.
Private detectives, pseudonyms, insanity, red notebooks and merging identities appear in all three stories which are really the same story told three ways. The Locked Room is the most viable, Ghosts has the most potential and while the recurring characters and themes are engaging, none have a satisfying ending. Auster raises questions and presents mysteries but never provides answers or resolutions.
In the final pages of The Locked Room, Auster – perhaps with a wink – provides analysis of his trilogy by describing the contents of Fanshawe's red notebook:
If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out ... Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible ... He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again.
The Locked Room closes with each page torn from the red notebook and dropped in a trash bin. Perhaps my copy of The New York Trilogy should join it there. Auster presents two entertaining theories about the Tower of Babel and Don Quixote that deserve a second look but everything else is rubbish.
I've read one other book by Paul Auster: Travels In The Scriptorium. In it, an aging author is imprisoned in his mind by the characters from his stories. Like The New York Trilogy, Auster builds suspense with mastery but struggles with the denouement. His questions are consistently more satisfying than his answers.
