City of Glass

Spoilers ahead

Daniel Quinn writes mysteries under the pseudonym William Wilson. An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.

Honestly, I find this book difficult to review because it goes against everything a mystery novel is. The detective, Daniel Quinn, isn't a detective. He's a writer of detective fiction. He is hired to protect Peter Stillman from his father, but the father isn't after Stillman. Stillman doesn't need protecting. There isn't a mystery. There isn't a conspiracy, but Quinn acts as if there should be. He spends days and months trailing Stillman Sr, who spends his days walking around New York City and picking up various broken things. That's it. He's not out to hurt his son. He's just an insane old man. But Quinn continues to trail him and when he can't because Stillman Sr seems to have disappeared, he camps out in front of Peter Stillman's house, rarely sleeping and eating very little in order to maintain constant surveillance. He keeps expecting Virginia Stillman, Peter's wife, to become the infamous femme fatale, which she doesn't because this isn't a standard work of detective fiction.

And if that doesn't defy your expectations enough, there's the issue of identity in this book. Daniel Quinn is an empty character. He doesn't have much motivation or thoughts. He writes one or two mystery novels a year, under the name of William Wilson, and that's about it. However, when he is asked to take on the Stillman case, he decides to emulate Max Work, his idol, and also the fictional detective in his novels. In a sense, Quinn becomes a false detective both in name and occupation since he's not really a detective and he's not really on a case.

It's an odd book and a hard one to review. Looking back on my own review, I don't think I make it look very desirable to read, but I do encourage you pick it up and give it a try. It's fairly short and reads quickly. Even if you don't try to read too much into it, the surface story is fairly interesting as well.

Ghosts

In Ghosts, Auster bares the basics of detective fiction to this concept: one person (the detective) watching another (the Other). He does this to the point that the characters don't even have names. The protagonists is Blue and his job is to watch Black. He was hired by White and trained by Brown. He envies the determination of Gold in his quest to find the murderer of a small boy. You get my point.

The book was good, though I didn't enjoy it quite as much as City of Glass. There's some staple elements of postmodernism such as paranoia, detachment, and the entire story was a bit pastiche. The ending, like the main story, did not follow the norm of detective fiction (nor did it wholly resolve) but it didn't take away from this story at all.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to begin treading the waters of postmodernism. The New York Trilogy on the whole is very accessible as well as enjoyable.

Reviews for the last book will be added once I've read it ( )

Yeah, he's brilliant. I kept turning the pages. This is a airport/transport book, but not a beach one: The lives are so bleak, human stripped of any human connections. The mystery, the case, is all and it's not really going to be solved. As someone else here put it: "The inability to find or discover the other becomes the inability to understand oneself."

I'm not sure to whom I would recommend this,or any Auster fiction. But this is a good introduction to him. ( )

Was not impressed: I read this book because I loved Paul Aster's Brooklyn Follies. This compilation of 3 short stories may have well been written by a completely different author. They are short detective stories that are slightly intertwined. I did not enjoy this book and do not recommend it.

An existentially probing series of interrelated detective stories. In each of the three stories in "The New York Trilogy" the search for the other is sublimated and internalized as a search for the self. The inability to find or discover the other becomes the inability to understand oneself. Auster's style is sparse, in the style of the great pulp detective novels of the early part of the 1900s. A philosophically intense and brilliantly constructed novel that should be standard fare in high school and college literature classes. One of the very best contemporary novels. ( )

Blue, Black, Quinn, Stillman, Fanshawe - I got it, I think, but now I've forgotten what happened and why.