City of Glass
"City of Glass" is a novella by Paul Auster, first published in 1985 and part of his acclaimed "New York Trilogy." The story centers on Daniel Quinn, a writer of detective fiction who accidentally becomes embroiled in a case when he receives calls intended for a detective agency owned by another Paul Auster. Quinn is hired by Peter Stillman Jr., a man haunted by his traumatic childhood and fears regarding his father, who has recently been released from prison. As Quinn investigates, he confronts themes of identity, language, and the nature of reality, culminating in his own existential crisis.
The narrative explores complex relationships between characters, particularly emphasizing the struggle between communication and disconnection. Auster's minimalist prose is complemented by a graphic novel adaptation by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, which creatively interprets the story through visual elements that enrich its themes. This adaptation is noted for its innovative artistic approach, using a simple black-and-white style that reflects the starkness of Quinn's journey. "City of Glass" has garnered recognition for its literary significance and influence in both literature and the graphic novel medium, prompting discussions about the interplay between text and visual art.
City of Glass
AUTHOR: Auster, Paul; Karasik, Paul; Mazzucchelli, David
ARTIST: David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)
PUBLISHER: Avon Books
FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1994
Publication History
In the early 1990’s, Avon Books editor Bob Callahan launching Neon Lit, a series of comics adaptations of noir literature, and brought in well-known comics creator Art Spiegelman as co-editor. Spiegelman had a personal connection with Paul Auster, a poet, playwright, and critic who had become an acclaimed novelist with the publication of his 1985 novella City of Glass (collected as part of his New York Trilogy in 1987). Spiegelman had previously invited Auster to contribute to a putative series of comics scripted by literary novelists, but Auster ultimately suggested someone adapt one of his existing novels instead. When the Neon Lit project came up, City of Glass seemed an ideal candidate.
Spiegelman passed the challenge on to David Mazzucchelli, who had risen to prominence with art for Daredevil (starting in 1985) and Batman: Year One (1987), before moving into the independent sector with work for Fantagraphics Books and Drawn and Quarterly. However, Mazzucchelli became frustrated with his attempts to restructure the text, feeling that he was only managing a superficial telling of the story. Spiegelman then contacted Paul Karasik, a former Fantagraphics editor, for assistance. By coincidence, Karasik had tried some rough layouts for an adaptation of City of Glass after first reading the book in 1987. He produced a new set of breakdowns that were more successful and Mazzucchelli remained on the project to develop Karasik’s breakdowns. The two artists also met with Auster to seek his input. As a result, the final piece was a collaborative effort.
Plot
Daniel Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, receives two telephone calls asking for Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency. On the second call, he claims that he is Auster and agrees to meet and discuss a case. Quinn is hired by a traumatized young man named Peter Stillman, Jr., who fears that his father, just released from prison, is coming to kill him. Peter’s wife, Virginia, pays Quinn five hundred dollars to find Peter’s father, follow him, and warn Peter of any danger.
Quinn researches the case. He reads the elder Stillman’s book, which concerns the Fall of Man. A seventeenth-century pastor named Henry Dark believed that humans had forgotten the language they had spoken in the Garden of Eden and that relearning this language could restore paradise. Stillman, Sr., tried to discover this language by conducting cruel experiments on his son, forcing him to grow up without human contact. This is the reason Stillman, Sr., was imprisoned.
Quinn sees Stillman, Sr., arrive in New York and follows him. When the two finally converse, Stillman, Sr., admits that he invented Henry Dark and that those deranged beliefs were his own. Stillman, Sr., seems insane but harmless, collecting discarded objects and giving them new names.
Quinn loses the trail and then loses contact with his employers. Out of ideas, Quinn goes to find the real Paul Auster, but he knows nothing of the Stillmans or detective work. Eventually Quinn decides to watch the Stillmans’ apartment around the clock, living in the alleyway opposite. After months, he gives up and goes home, but he finds his apartment has been let to someone else. Auster tells him Stillman, Sr., committed suicide. Quinn returns to the Stillmans’ apartment, finding it empty. Staying there, he fills the rest of his notebook on the case.
The narrator, a friend of Auster, returns from abroad. The narrator hears the story from Auster and castigates him for not doing more to help. The two of them search for Quinn but find only his notebook.
Characters
•Daniel Quinn, the protagonist, is a thirty-five-year-old man. He was a poet, playwright, and literary critic but gave up those endeavors after his wife and son died. He now writes mystery novels under the name William Wilson, and his mental state appears to be declining. When he receives calls intended for “The Paul Auster Detective Agency,” he poses as Auster and accepts the case.
•Peter Stillman, Jr., is a young man damaged by his father’s language experiments. He was locked in a darkened room as a child, was permitted no contact with the outside world, and was beaten if he used adult language. He struggles to speak coherently. He hires Quinn to seek out his father.
•Virginia Stillman, an attractive young woman, is Peter’s wife. Formerly his speech therapist, she married him to get him out of a psychiatric hospital. Because Peter struggles to communicate clearly, she fills in important details for Quinn.
•Peter Stillman, Sr., is an elderly man, disheveled and disordered. He was an academic: After the death of his wife, he gave up work to look after their son. When his experiments were discovered, his son was taken into custody, and he was sent to prison. In the present, his sentence is over, and he returns to New York.
•Paul Auster is a thirty-eight-year-old writer entirely based on the real-life Auster but is not the narrator of City of Glass, who is a separate character. When Quinn goes to meet him, Auster says he knows nothing of the Stillmans or why anyone should think he runs a detective agency.
Artistic Style
Appropriately, Auster’s clear, stripped-down prose is accompanied by a simple, uncluttered visual style, in black and white. This was partly dictated by the small panel size, but it was also a choice Mazzucchelli made to facilitate Karasik’s intention that some sections of the book should use iconic imagery. Hence, characters’ neutral expressions are sometimes rendered with no mouth, and the background is often left unoccupied as in cartoons. The flexibility of this style allows for playfulness that connects with the themes of Auster’s original story. The completed art bears more resemblance to Mazzucchelli’s style than Karasik’s, but the drafts passed between each of them. The art style uses heavy lines and is largely clean and orderly but not quite slick; the figures are slightly angular, and some rough edges are present.
The book uses a nine-panel grid: Karasik initially planned to adhere more strictly to this structure, but Mazzucchelli opened it out, merging some panels to accommodate Neon Lit’s small page size. The regimented style is appropriate to Auster’s prose but also reflects the streets of New York. The regular intervals often serve to add punch to prose that has been drawn from the novella and broken down into captions. Mazzucchelli’s first attempt, from before Karasik came aboard, incorporates longer chunks of the text in captions, and this rhythm is lacking.
The style breaks down toward the end in two ways. First, the artwork becomes less orderly after Quinn begins to “lose his grip.” The lines become rougher and sketchier, in tune with Quinn’s deterioration. Finally, the panel structure also breaks down: first with broadening gutters, then with panel layouts drawn freehand, before the panels seem to finally break loose and drift away from the page. Once Quinn’s story is over, another style is adopted for the entrance of the narrator. There are no panel borders, and the bold chiaroscuro lines of the main text are replaced by a softer gray wash. Quinn’s world has vanished, and the way the world looked, which gave the reader such insights, has vanished with it.
Themes
The novella’s major themes concern language and the naming of things. When Stillman, Sr., says that when things are broken they need new names, he is unwittingly talking about Quinn, who was broken by the deaths of his wife and child and became William Wilson. Throughout, the reader encounters shifting identities, names lost and replicated, and the confusion of one thing for another. The comics adaptation adds its own angle on this subject.
After the blackout of the first page, the first images include a slow zoom away from a telephone. By panel four, the zoom seems complete, but it continues, revealing that the “telephone” is actually an image in the corner of a notepad, on which rests a telephone. The reality of what the reader sees is immediately brought into question, but more important, the reader has been led to mistake a symbol for the thing itself.
Stillman, Sr., believes that words and the objects they described were once interchangeable. This is illustrated when Adam invents the word “shadow,” and his shadow is shaped like the word. In a comic, text and images coexist and are able to interact in a way that would be contrived onscreen. The comic also draws the readers’ attention to different typographical approaches: The disordered speech of Stillman, Jr., features a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, while the biblical delusions of grandeur Stillman, Sr., holds are suggested by the use of initiums (the large, elaborate initials in an illuminated manuscript) in his speech balloons.
In flashbacks and exposition of abstract ideas, the book draws on other types of imagery, which, as Mazzucchelli observes, allow “the style of drawing to act as another layer of information in this already dense presentation.” Virginia’s narration of her husband’s traumatic past renders everything in iconic imagery, in the minimal style of universal symbols, which has the effect of depersonalizing the narrative. At the other extreme, the artists sometimes import images, using something far more detailed than their normal style. For instance, they reproduce a 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. (This is in sharp contrast to the rest of the page, which uses a piece of commercial art to make a visual pun regarding New York being the “big apple” and the new paradise.) Yet another type of image is imported when Quinn is placed against a street map of New York. The spectrum this creates is reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s scale of pictures and words in Understanding Comics (1993), running from “received” information to “perceived” information.
Much of the artwork in City of Glass suggests pictures becoming more like words. If City of Glass is primarily a novella about language, its comics adaptation expands its range to encompass the language of images.
Impact
The Neon Lit series produced only one more book, Barry Gifford’s Perdita Durango (1995). According to a contemporary review of City of Glass in The New York Times, William Gresham’s Nightmare Alley was to have been the third in the series but this never materialized. In his introduction to Picador’s 2004 reprint, Spiegelman called City of Glass a “breakthrough” in the field and so it was. Karasik made this seemingly impossible project work, and his approach to the adaptation is instructive to anyone looking to undertake a similar project.
Some reviewers have even suggested that the adaptation is a worthy equal to the novella, a rare accolade for this type of book. However, few works like it have been published since. Turning novels into comics still carries the stigma of illustrated classics for readers unwilling to read the so-called proper book. Additionally, most comics adaptations of literature are of out-of-copyright works, for understandable financial reasons, and so postmodern fiction is not considered. However, the U.K. publisher SelfMadeHero has led the way in adapting some of the more challenging classics, including adaptations of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (2008), by David Zane Mairowitz; Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1996), by Martin Rowson; and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (2011), by Rob Davis.
Further Reading
Mazzucchelli, David. Asterios Polyp (2009).
Karasik, Paul, and Judy Karasik. The Ride Together: A Brother and Sister’s Memoir of Autism in the Family (2004).
Rowson, Martin, and Laurence Sterne. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (2010).
Bibliography
Coughlan, David. “Paul Auster’s City of Glass: The Graphic Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 832-854.
Karasik, Paul. “Coffee with Paul Karasik.” Interview by Bill Kartalopoulos. Indy Magazine, Spring, 2004. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring‗2004/karasik‗interview/index.html.
Mazzucchelli, David. “Three Questions for David Mazzucchelli.” Interview by Bill Kartalopoulos. Indy Magazine, Spring, 2004. http://www.indyworld.com/indy/spring‗2004/mazzucchelli‗interview/index.html.