The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

First published: 1987; includes City of Glass, 1985; Ghosts, 1986; The Locked Room, 1986

Type of work: Novels

Type of plot: Detective and mystery

Time of plot: City of Glass, mid-1970’s; Ghosts, February 3, 1947-August 10, 1948; The Locked Room, mid-1970’s

Locale: New York City

Principal characters

• Daniel Quinn, a mystery writer who writes under the pseudonym William Wilson
• Max Work, the detective hero of Quinn’s fiction
• Paul Auster the Detective, an alleged detective whom Quinn impersonates
• Peter Stillman, his client
• Professor Peter Stillman, his client’s father
• Virginia Stillman, his client’s wife
• Paul Auster the Writer,
• Blue, a detective
• The Future Mrs. Blue, his fiancé
• White, his client
• Black, the man Blue follows
• Unnamed Narrator,
• Fanshawe, his childhood friend
• Sophie Fanshawe, Fanshawe’s deserted wife

The Story:

In City of Glass, Daniel Quinn is a lonely mystery novelist who lives in New York City, where he writes one mystery novel per year, reads a great deal, and takes many walks. One night, he answers a wrong number and decides to impersonate the man being sought, Paul Auster the detective. He goes to meet his clients, the Stillmans.

Peter Stillman is a young man who has recently left a sanatorium after spending nine years of his childhood locked by himself in a dark room as part of an experiment conducted by his deranged father, Professor Peter Stillman. The Stillmans have sought Paul Auster to protect Peter from his father, who is himself scheduled to be released from a hospital for the criminally insane the next day. Virginia Stillman, the wife of the younger Stillman, pays Quinn with a five-hundred-dollar check in the name of Paul Auster and kisses him passionately before he leaves.

Quinn reads Professor Stillman’s academic work, which cites Henry Dark, who argued in the seventeenth century that a new Tower of Babel would be built in America in 1960, the year Stillman locked up his son. For the two weeks following Professor Stillman’s release, Quinn follows him as Stillman walks about the city, picks up objects, and makes notes in a red notebook. Quinn keeps detailed notes of Stillman’s route in a red notebook of his own and eventually realizes that Stillman’s path is describing letters on the city streets. The first fifteen letters spell “The Tower of Babel.”

Feeling emboldened by understanding Stillman’s message, Quinn speaks with his quarry three times, using the personas of Quinn, Henry Dark, and finally Peter Stillman. Each time, Stillman responds with delight at the name Quinn uses, since “Quinn” rhymes with “twin,” Henry Dark is a name Stillman invented in his research because it shared initials with Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, and Peter Stillman is his own name and that of his son.

Eventually, Quinn loses Stillman’s trail and seeks Paul Auster the detective, hoping that the real detective will be able to help him protect the young Peter Stillman. Quinn finds only one Paul Auster in the New York City phone book, but when he goes to his apartment, he finds that it belongs to Paul Auster the writer, who knows nothing of detective work but tells Quinn of his current study of the print history of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615).

After meeting with Auster, Quinn phones Virginia Stillman to tell her he has lost the trail, but her phone is constantly busy. Convinced that he must pursue the case nonetheless, Quinn stakes out the alley next to the Stillman home. He slowly reduces the amount of food and sleep he needs, taking shelter in a dumpster as necessary and always writing in his red notebook. He becomes an itinerant.

When Quinn runs out of money, he calls Auster, who had offered to cash the advance check Virginia Stillman had written to Quinn in Auster’s name. Auster tells Quinn that the check bounced and that Professor Peter Stillman committed suicide two and a half months earlier. Quinn goes home to his apartment, only to find it occupied by a young woman who tells him she rented it after the the writer who used to live there disappeared.

Quinn returns to Peter Stillman’s apartment and curls up in a small room. Trays of hot food appear regularly, and he lives alone and naked, writing in his red notebook and sleeping a great deal. Quinn’s red notebook ends by asking what will happen when the red notebook is full.

An unnamed narrator addresses readers, claiming to have accompanied Paul Auster to the Stillman apartment and found Quinn’s red notebook. The narrative, he claims, has been pieced together from Auster’s recollections and the contents of the notebook.

In Ghosts, also narrated by an unnamed narrator, White hires Blue to watch Black, providing Blue with the key to the apartment across from Black’s on Orange Street. White asks for weekly reports and pays a five-hundred-dollar advance with ten fifty-dollar bills.

Blue watches Black, who spends most of his time reading and writing, occasionally going out for groceries or a walk. With nothing to do but watch, Blue begins to turn inward for the first time in his life, and he invents stories about why he was hired. When it comes time to write his first weekly report, Blue realizes that he no longer believes that words and reality have a clear, transparent relationship, and he is tempted to include some of his speculations in his report. He eventually writes a terse report about Black’s reading and writing habits, and he receives a money order by post a few days later.

This pattern continues for over a year with only a few minor interruptions. Once, Black and a woman meet for a lunch that ends in tears. Once, Blue bumps into the future Mrs. Blue, whom he has not contacted since taking the case, and she pounds his chest, yelling “You, You!” and breaks off their engagement. Another time, Blue watches the mailbox to which he sends his reports, only to see a man wearing a mask, whom he presumes to be White in disguise, picking up the report.

The boundaries of reality begin to break down for Blue, who wonders if White has also hired Black to live under Blue’s gaze. Blue even wonders if there are several Blacks, each of whom performs for him and then returns to a normal life at the end of his workday.

Eventually, Blue arranges encounters with Black, adopting different personas. As Jimmy Rose, an elderly itinerant, he speaks to Black about nineteenth century American literature. Soon thereafter, Blue follows Black into Manhattan and sits down with him in a hotel bar, where each man orders a Black and White on the rocks. Black says he is a private detective and has been watching a man write a book for over a year. He assumes the man knows he is watching and needs him in order to feel alive.

Now certain that Black is in on the case, Blue disguises himself as a brush salesman and knocks on Black’s door. Blue and Black discuss the merits of various brands of toothbrushes and hairbrushes, and Black purchases two brushes. Three nights later, Black leaves his apartment and Blue takes the opportunity to break in. He steals a stack of papers from Black’s desk and finds them to be his own weekly reports.

Blue returns to his apartment in a state of depression and stays in, unshaved and unkempt, for several days. Finally, he decides to confront Black. He showers, shaves, and dresses in his best suit before crossing the street to Black’s apartment. Black invites him in, wearing the same mask that Blue had seen on the man at the post office, suggesting that Black and White are the same person. Black and Blue fight, and Blue beats Black severely. Blue tries unsuccessfully to determine whether the other man is still alive; he thinks he hears Black’s breathing, but it may be his own.

Blue takes the book that Black has been writing and returns to his apartment to read it. As Black told him, Blue knows the book by heart. Blue leaves his apartment. The narrator says that it is unknown what happened to Blue afterward, but perhaps he went to China.

In The Locked Room, the first-person narrator receives a letter from Sophie Fanshawe, the wife of his childhood friend. His friend Fanshawe has disappeared, and Sophie has hired the private detective Quinn to find him, to no avail. Fanshawe, a writer, had named the narrator his literary executor. The narrator reads the Fanshawe manuscripts and, judging them to be brilliant, arranges for their publication over a period of several years. He takes Sophie out to celebrate, and the two fall in love.

All is well until the narrator receives an unsigned letter with a New York postmark. It is from Fanshawe, who thanks the narrator for taking care of his literary estate and family. He does not want to be found and threatens to kill the narrator should he be sought. The narrator does not tell Sophie about the letter. Eventually, he marries her and adopts Fanshawe’s son. As the narrator works on Fanshawe’s literary estate, people begin to wonder if the narrator and Fanshawe are the same person.

The narrator undertakes a biography of Fanshawe. He interviews Fanshawe’s mother and ends up having violent sex with her. He travels to Paris, where he speaks with Fanshawe’s acquaintances and sleeps with his former girlfriend. Unable to make progress and yet unable to go home, the narrator withdraws from the world, entering a blurry month of alcohol and sex with prostitutes. In reflecting on this time, the narrator explains that he is the author of Ghosts and The Locked Room, and that the three stories are versions of each other, representing his changing awareness of their meaning.

One night in a bar, the narrator sees a young man whom he calls “Fanshawe.” The man corrects him, introducing himself as Peter Stillman. The narrator follows Stillman from the bar, and the two fight, with Stillman beating the narrator severely. The narrator is now ready to return to his family in New York.

Some time later, the narrator receives a final letter from Fanshawe asking him to come to a Boston address, where the two speak through the door of a locked room where Fanshawe now lives under the name Henry Dark. Fanshawe recounts his life since his disappearance, including an account of the few weeks he spent shadowing the narrator and his family. Fanshawe says he has taken poison and will soon die. He has, however, left a red notebook of his final writings under the stairs. At Fanshawe’s request, the narrator leaves, taking the red notebook with him. In the train station, he reads the notebook, which is strangely constructed so that each sentence cancels out the one that came before. The narrator tears out the pages one by one, coming to the last page as his train arrives.

Bibliography

Bernstein, Stephen. “’The Question Is the Story Itself’: Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy.” In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Argues that reading through the intertextual clues in the trilogy allows readers to find a coherent message: that meaning is impossible to find.

Briggs, Robert. “Wrong Numbers: The Endless Fiction of Auster and Deleuze and Guattari and . . . .” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44, no. 2 (2003): 213-224. Playful examination of The New York Trilogy alongside Auster’s The Red Notebook, arguing that reading the two together creates an endless multiplicity of stories and interpretations of how authorship is portrayed throughout Auster’s body of work.

Dimovitz, Scott A. “Public Personae and the Private I: De-compositional Ontology in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 3 (2006): 613-633. This compelling article suggests that the trilogy is neither postmodern nor poststructuralist in its inflections, arguing instead that it negates a postmodern worldview.

Morley, Catherine. “The Book of Allusions: Where Is Samuel Beckett in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy?” In Beckett’s Literary Legacies, edited by Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2007. Examines the intersections of Auster’s trilogy and Beckett’s trilogy of novels—Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnameable (1953)—paying attention to the themes of absurdity and futility.

Müller, Monika. “From Hard-Boiled Detective to Kaspar Hauser? Masculinity and Writing in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.” In Subverting Masculinity: Hegemonic and Alternative Versions of Masculinity in Contemporary Culture, edited by Russell West and Frank Lay. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Argues that Auster’s three novels can be seen as exploring the relationship of masculinity, writing, and domesticity; focuses on the trilogy’s intertextuality with nineteenth century American writers.

Rubenstein, Roberta. “Doubling, Intertextuality, and the Postmodern Uncanny: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 9, no. 3 (1998): 245-262. Lucid exploration of the Freudian uncanny as it appears repeatedly throughout Auster’s trilogy.

Russell, Alison. “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31, no. 2 (1990): 71-84. Derridean reading of the trilogy that focuses on the multiple levels of linguistic recursiveness in the text.

Tish, Chris. “From One Mirror to Another: The Rhetoric of Disaffiliation in City of Glass.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 1 (1994): 46-52. This linguistically playful article argues that City of Glass challenges the authority of the father, thus questioning the stability of language, identity, and culture.

Zilcosky, John. “The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 39, no. 3 (1998): 195-206. Argues that Auster’s trilogy challenges Roland Barthes’s theory that the author is dead, since the trilogy shows authorship as dispersed and complicated but very much alive.