Solving This Mystery Might Destroy You
Reviewing Paul Auster’s Modern Classic ‘The New York Trilogy’
Detective stories follow a fairly predictable structure: a crime comes to light, then the detective works all the angles and eventually smokes out the perpetrator. All the color comes from the specifics of plot and character with endless possible variations. In a sense, it’s like a sonnet: a set form the writer can infuse with nearly anything they want. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy isn’t that kind of detective story.
The trilogy consists of three novellas, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986), usually published together in one volume. All three violate the rules, and the third throws you for a loop that—how do I even talk about it without giving away the whole game?
A Life in Shards
City of Glass begins with Daniel Quinn, a writer and recent widower, who’s lost both his young wife and son. Driven by a mix of numbness and submerged grief, he retreats into himself. He writes pulp detective novels to make rent under the pseudonym William Wilson—a play off an Edgar Allan Poe doppelgänger story that hints at things to come. Quinn lacks ambition, friends, a reason for living. He pushes on by little more than inertia, until a fateful late-night phone call.
The voice on the other end, strange and foreign sounding with an androgynous “mechanical whisper,” asks to speak with the detective Paul Auster. (An amusing and telling feature of the novel is how Auster writes a version of himself into the storyline.) Quinn tells the caller they have the wrong number. The same thing happens again the next night. Again, Quinn corrects the caller and hangs up. But the third time? Quinn decides to play along: “This is Auster speaking.” The desperate caller tells Quinn that someone is planning to kill him.
After writing God knows how many detective novels, and with nothing better to do, Quinn decides it can’t be that hard: He agrees to meet with the caller, a man named Peter Stillman, the next morning.
He visits Stillman’s apartment, meets his wife Virginia—toward whom he finds an immediate attraction—and then settles down for Stillman’s weird explanation of the threat he faces. Weird because the of the nature of the threat and weird because of Peter himself. His movements are strange, his speech even stranger. Nothing comes out normally, which turns out to be part of the story.
Peter’s mother died when he was a little child. “No mother, then,” he says. “Ha ha. Such is my laughter now, my belly burst of mumbo jumbo. Ha ha ha. Big father said: it makes no difference. To me. That is to say, to him. Big father of the big muscles and the boom, boom, boom. No questions now, please.”
If that makes little sense, imagine poor Quinn trying to understand as Peter rambles on: “Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. Clack clack bedrack. Numb noise, flacklemuch, chewmanna. Ya, ya, ya. Excuse me. I am the only one who understands these words.” What the heck has Quinn stumbled into? He tries keeping track of it all in a red notebook, purchased especially for the case.
Mystery Unsolved
It turns out Peter’s dad, Peter Stillman Sr., was a Columbia professor, obsessed with linguistics, though incapable of the real work of his obsession. But the death of his wife? That allowed him freedom to conduct a horrific experiment. He locked Peter in a room with no external stimuli to see how his language abilities would evolve independent of human interference. Shouldn’t he learn to speak the language of God himself?
A fire exposed the crime, and young Peter—twelve years old, practically feral, and unable to communicate much at all—was finally freed of his room. The senior Stillman was prosecuted and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars. And now he’s being released. Peter’s convinced he’ll come back and kill him. Peter and Virginia want Quinn to follow the father once he hits town and keep them apprised of his whereabouts.
Immediately, the case becomes intellectually interesting to Quinn: stories of children raised in similar deprivation, Stillman’s loony linguistic theories, and one detail haunting him from beyond the grave: Quinn’s deceased son was also named Peter.
As planned, he spots Stillman leaving the train station and tails him. But the old man shows no apparent interest in heading to Peter’s apartment to even say hello, let alone murder him. Quinn regularly checks in with Virginia to update her on his progress, but there’s little to report. No surprise, his fascination with her continues. In the meantime, Stillman just seems to aimlessly wander around the city. Might there be some message in his movements?
At last, Quinn decides to provoke something by engaging the old man—no admission of his interest—just to see what comes of it. And so begin several queer encounters in which the elderly felon unpacks his theories, forgetting who Quinn is between each visit. It’s clear Stillman has lost his marbles. At one point Quinn pretends to be Peter, which delights the old man, who finally seems to experience a moment of peace in what feels to him like a resolution, even a reconciliation.
And then he disappears. Without Quinn realizing it, Stillman moves out of his rooms and vanishes. Everyone goes on high alert, Peter, Virginia, Quinn. Now might be the moment the he decides to strike. Quinn figures the only solution is to go undercover as a homeless man outside Peter’s apartment so he can maintain 24/7 surveillance.
I won’t spoil what happens next, but when this bizarre assignment ends, nothing is the same for Quinn. Virginia stops taking his calls. In fact, the couple vacates their apartment. What does he have to show for all his work? He can’t find the man he’s tailing, and he can’t even find his clients!
Ghosted
As a novel, Ghosts is stranger still. Auster strips the basics of the detective story down to the studs. The only names in the tale are mostly last names, all colors: Brown, Green, Gray, and so on. White (the client) hires Blue (the detective) to surveil Black (the subject).
At first, Blue assumes it’s a marriage case, maybe catching someone in an infidelity. His only job is to report on Black’s activities and mail a written weekly report to White. He starts well enough, holing up in an apartment across the street and spying through the windows, dutifully noting all he sees. The trouble is that he sees practically nothing. Black reads and writes. He leaves to buys groceries. He returns to read and write.
Black’s behavior is so routine that Blue realizes he doesn’t even need to keep an eye on him to know what he’s up to. Soon he knows everything about Black, and there isn’t anything worth his time. Blue starts leaving his post, going to movies. No worries. Nothing changes. But the longer he’s responsible for keeping tabs on Black—which goes on for months—the less connection he has to the rest of his life.
It comes to head when he realizes his fiancée assumes he’s dead and has moved on with her life. “He has lost whatever chance he might have had for happiness. . . .” And for what? There’s no progress in the case, he’s got nothing to show for his work, and his life has dissolved in the meantime.
The crisis forces Blue to confront White. It doesn’t go well. So he then decides to confront Black. It goes even worse, and that’s when the whole case flips on its head. Was Blue actually the subject of the investigation the entire time?
“I wanted to turn everything inside out,” said Auster, describing his work.
Melting Down
If City of Glass was pointlessly tragic and Ghosts simply baffling, you have to keep moving into The Locked Room, which makes roundabout sense of both its predecessors.
The story starts with an author Fanshawe and an unnamed narrator, who has known him since they were boys. Fanshawe has disappeared. His wife Sophie contacts the narrator to let him know that Fanshawe left a pile of unpublished work, and told her should anything happen to him that his old childhood friend, a writer and literary critic with publishing connections, should step in as his literary executor and determine if it should be published.
He reads the material and sees its worth. It takes some finagling, but he secures a publishing deal for one of the novels and makes plans to publish the rest. It’s a sleeper hit and sales take off. So does a relationship with Sophie. The two marry, and the narrator now steps in to father Fanshawe’s son, as well as parent his old friend’s work.
And suddenly faint signals begin glowing. Blue loses the woman should have become his wife. Quinn lost his wife and his son, and when Quinn finally meets the novel’s version of Paul Auster he finds he’s not actually a detective at all, but a writer; what’s more, he’s married with a son. These novellas are talking with each other—only in whispers—three different stories not so different after all, circling the same questions.
While technically not a detective, the unnamed narrator of The Locked Room becomes obsessed with finding Fanshawe. He doesn’t believe he’s dead and soon encounters reason for his belief. Meanwhile, his publisher wants more Fanshawe since the books are doing so well. The world wants more Fanshawe!
So he agrees to write a biography of his long-lost friend with the secret hope of locating his whereabouts. The project becomes all-consuming, jeopardizing his relationship with Sophie, even—and you probably knew this was coming at this point since the same thing happens in the prior novellas—his own sanity.
He interviews old connections and colleagues, reads old letters, and eventually follows the trail to Paris, despite Sophie’s plea to abandon the biography which has now fully swallowed him and driven a wedge between them. While overseas, he hits nothing but dead ends and falls apart, suffering a total collapse.
The Real Mystery
Auster rejected the idea that he’d written three detective novels in the New York Trilogy. They are, after all, only playing with the form. “I tried to use certain genre conventions to get to another place,” he said in an interview.
You know you’re in a different sort of book when you start noticing the way the books not only talk to each other, but how they talk with other literature: Poe, Cervantes, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. The name of the vanished Fanshawe is a direct reference to Hawthorne’s first novel, which the author loathed so much he tried to destroy every copy printed, much like the fictitious Fanshawe does with his own life and the unnamed narrator does in trying to understand why.
Said Auster,
The whole process Quinn undergoes in [City of Glass]—and the characters in the other two, as well—is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. . . . At some point or another, all three characters undergo a form of humiliation, of degradation, and perhaps that is a necessary stage of discovering who we are.
The real mystery is the self, our drives and desires, our moves and motives. Why do we do what we do, think what we think, fear what we fear? The answers to those questions are elusive—no matter how determined the detective because, unlike real detective work, the crimes, the victims, the perpetrators, and all the rest are sometimes unknowable.
“It was always irritating to me to hear these books described as detective novels,” he said in another exchange. The trilogy is “about uncertainty, and the fact that there are no eternal givens in the world. Somehow, we have to make room for the things we don’t understand. We have to live with obscurity. I’m not talking about a passive, quietistic acceptance of things, but rather the realization that there are things we’re not going to know.”
And what we do discover comes, as the narrator in Ghosts says, “at great personal expense.”
Locked in the World
The convention of locked-room mysteries dictates a murder happens within a set space, impermeable from the outside. Somehow a person is killed by whatever and whomever is in the space, usually by some elaborate and complicated means, hence the mystery. Auster’s play on the concept in the title is the interpretive key for the three novellas.
The whole, wide, confusing world is the locked room, and we’re all detectives trying to make sense of the puzzle. It requires all our wits, which prove insufficient, and usually the collapse of what we think we know to finally attain some sort of understanding of what it all means.
Fanshawe leaves his friend a notebook, red—a callback to Quinn’s log in City of Glass—which he says will explain the whole story. It doesn’t. The narrator finds it impenetrable. Still, he reads on, tearing out the pages one by one like days as he goes.
Auster described City of Glass as a “fictitious subterranean autobiography,” and in a way we can read it, the whole trilogy, like our own diaries.
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Absolutely great review
I've been wanting to read this trilogy for years. Your enjoyable review tipped the scales and I've added it to my TBR stack on my nightstand. You write so well, it's a pleasure to read, no matter what you are writing about :-)