New York Trilogy

Just got back from our honeymoon to Belize. Great trip! Also great for my reading -- I got through 6 books on the trip. Too many to write about right now, so I'm just going to talk about the most interesting one, maybe with a line or two about the others some other time.

Most thought-provoking was definitely Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. The trilogy consists of three odd short stories, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room.

City of Glass sets the tone by its combination of literary story and detective story. Writer Quinn gets a phone call by someone looking for the famous detective Paul Auster, and gets sucked into the middle of a dysfunctional family relationship. He's hired to tail a man who tortured his son to test his theories of language development, but loses track of the man, and goes into this weird fugue state as he tries to find the man again.

Ghosts is the story of a detective, Blue, who's hired to watch a man, Black, who sits in his room all day writing. Blue eventually decides to take a more active role, and confronts Black directly, only to find that Black is actually the man who hired him, and that Black is writing the story of Blue's surveillance.

In The Locked Room, Fanshawe, a long-distant friend of the narrator's, suddenly disappears, naming the narrator his literary executor. The narrator then sets out to find Fanshawe.

It's been commonly noticed that all three novels share a detective-novel theme. I think that it's not so commonly noticed that all of them dwell on one aspect of the detective novel, namely shadowing a suspect. This is notable, I think, because following someone is the most passive common activity in what is generally thought of as an action-oriented genre. In the outer two books, the heroes are writers, which makes them natural observers. Blue, in Ghosts, is an actual detective, and he takes the most active steps in breaking out of the mold that someone else has set for him.

I found all three novellas somewhat disturbing, particularly The Locked Room, which rings so true to life in so many ways. They all deal to some extent with a breakdown in sanity -- when can you really tell that you've gone over the edge? For Quinn the fall is sudden and obvious -- but does Blue ever fall over the line? What about the narrator of The Locked Room?