A couple of years ago I was sent an unsolicited copy of 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster's most recent novel - his first in seven years. I'd heard of Auster before of course, but had never read him. I was initially a bit daunted by the book's 880 pages, but I ended up being completely swept away by its brilliance, and wrote a glowing review of it for Shiny New Books - you can read that here. Of course I thought I must read some more of Auster but time passed and that didn't happen. So when Annabel announced Paul Auster Reading Week on her blog, I jumped at the chance. And where better to start than his first published work, The New York Trilogy. By a happy chance it was selling for only £1.99 on Kindle, so I bought it and jumped straight in.
I knew little about the book when I started reading, beyond the fact that it consisted of three shorter works, originally published separately: City of Glass (1995), Ghosts (1996) and The Locked Room (1996). Though the stories are completely separate, they are linked by certain names and characters who pop up in each one. I have to admit that initially I found the whole thing rather overwhelming, especially City of Glass. This is about a man called Daniel Quinn who writes detective novels under the name William Wilson with a private eye narrator called Max Work:
Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him, Work had increasingly come to life. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. If Wilson was an illusion, he nevertheless justified the lives of the other two. If Wilson did not exist, he nevertheless was the bridge that allowed Quinn to pass from himself into Work. And little by little, Work had become a presence in Quinn’s life, his interior brother.
And as if that wasn't enough, Quinn gets a phone call, which is a wrong number, asking for a private detective called Paul Auster. Quinn becomes involved with Auster, who is investigating a case concerning a man named Peter Stillman, whose unusual upbringing has led him to some very strange habits of speech. When asked about the case, Stillman replies: “If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. . . . Long ago there was mother and father. I remember none of that. They say: mother died. Who they are I cannot say. . . . No mother, then. Ha ha. Such is my laughter now, my belly burst of mumbo jumbo. Ha ha ha". He continues in the same vein for many pages. I have to say it's pretty entertaining - I just hadn't been prepared for it all.
There are obvious links between the three books, including musings on and confusions of identity, and of course the fact that they are all versions of the detective genre. The private eye in the second story, Ghosts, is called Blue. He has a trainer called Brown. Brown has a client called White for whom he is investigating a man called Black who lives on Orange Street. White pays Blue for his written reports, but Blue gets more and more fascinated by Black and his life. I would say this was my least favourite, perhaps because I was slightly irritated by the tricksy naming of the characters.
Of the three, the one I found the most enjoyable was the third story, The Locked Room. Possibly this was because I found it the most accessible. It's the only one of the three that is told in the first person, though the narrator is not named. Could it be Auster himself? Be that as it may, here the narrator is researching the life and work of a longtime friend of his, a man named Fanshawe. Brilliantly talented and happily married to a beautiful woman named Sophie, Fanshawe has disappeared without trace, and is widely believed to be dead. He has left the narrator some writing which he has done in secret, and which the narrator publishes to huge acclaim. He also marries Sophie and adopts her baby, born posthumously after Fanshawe's disappearance. In other words, the narrator - who bears an uncanny physical similarity to Fanshawe - has taken over his friend's life. There's only one problem - Fanshawe is not dead, and the narrator is the only person who knows this. But the pressure of keeping the secret and of living an assumed life becomes increasingly confusing and troubling for the narrator:
Something monstrous was happening, and I had no control over it anymore. The sky was growing dark inside - that much was certain; the ground was trembling. . . . I could no longer make the right distinctions. This can never be that. Apples are not oranges, peaches are not plums. . . . But everything was beginning to have the same taste to me.
Of course the trilogy is celebrated for its influential post-modernism. There's so much here I haven't mentioned - lots of literary allusions and intertextuality - much musing on the theme of identity. I'm certainly not sorry to have read it, but I wasn't blown away as I had been by 4 3 2 1. On her recent blog post about Auster, Annabel points to other novels which are less challenging than this one - The Brooklyn Follies sounds enticing. I'm tempted to give it a go.
