Book Review | THE NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY

BY PAUL AUSTER | PUBLICATION: APRIL 1ST, 1990
PENGUIN BOOKS | GENRE: METAFICTION
RATING: ★★★★★

“Strip away the usual hallmarks of the genre—antagonists, plot twists, climactic deaths—and it still pulses with enigma.”

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The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster's work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

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"Living the Questions: Auster’s Fictional Mirror"

Are we the authors of our lives—or just characters trying to make sense of the plot? Is a mystery solved when the story ends—or when we stop asking questions?

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY is one of those rare books that operates on multiple levels—mystery, philosophy, and psychological drama. Though labeled a trilogy, it wasn’t written as one in the traditional sense. The three stories are thematically linked rather than narratively connected. And yet, after reading them, I realized that reflecting on each story individually would fail to capture the book’s cumulative effect—its evolving stages of awareness.

"Books must be read as deliberately
and reservedly as they were written."

I once read that these stories fall under the category of “meta-mystery.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I do know is that this is a mystery book in the most essential sense: the book itself is the mystery. Strip away the usual hallmarks of the genre—antagonists, plot twists, climactic deaths—and it still pulses with enigma. While there are detectives, or at least characters engaged in acts of detection, none of the three stories is a detective story in the conventional sense.

"In the good mystery there is nothing wasted,
no sentence, no word that is not significant.
And even if it is not significant,
it has the potential to be so –which amounts to the same thing."

Many adjectives have been hurled at this book, bouncing off its walls in an attempt to pin it down. To truly enjoy it, a reader must dodge them all. Auster has written a remarkably accessible book—it’s not difficult to read, but it demands thought. The recurring themes—man’s subconscious grip on identity, the causes and consequences of solitude, and the limits of language—are explored through strange yet believable scenarios. The setups are deceptively simple, but their implications are profound. More than once, I found myself asking, Why on earth did he do that?—only to realize I was judging from the outside. To be inside these situations is to confront something beyond rational comprehension.

“We imagine the real story inside the words,
and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story,
pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves.
This is deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps,
and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are,
but in the end we can never be sure,
and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves,
more and more aware of our own incoherence.
No one can cross the boundary into another
– for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself."

Auster wisely chose fiction as his medium. The ideas he explores would be hard to accept in everyday terms. But if we accept that our lives are stories—and we are their authors—then it’s foolish to ignore the moments when our identity falters, when solitude overwhelms us, or when language fails to express what we truly mean.

"No one wants to be part of a fiction,
and even less so if that fiction is real."

In the end, this book leaves more questions than answers. And perhaps that’s as it should be. This isn’t traditional fiction; it demands a certain level of engagement. The stories don’t end on the final page—they continue in our lives. How we carry them forward is entirely up to us.

"Everyone knows that stories are imaginary.
Whatever effect they might have on us, we know they are not true,
even when they tell us truths more important
than the ones we can find elsewhere.
As opposed to the story writer,
I was offering my creations directly to the real world,
and therefore it seemed possible to me
that they could affect this real world in a real way,
that they could eventually become part of the real itself.
No writer could ask for more than that."

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About the Author:

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honors include the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Paul Auster died in 2024.
Photo by Spencer Ostrander

F2F23, Frankie's, November 30, 2013
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