A review by batbones
The New York Trilogy: City of Glass / Ghosts / The Locked Room by Paul Auster

5.0

Here is delivered a mystery that is half mystery and half a questioning of the mystery genre. The Literary Review's christening of it as a "metaphysical thriller" (quoted on the back cover) is not a misnomer. In increasing generality, it brings into consideration the significance of actions, signs, and ultimately, the representation of reality, the straining of words to meet and fix the Real. The New York Trilogy is made of three mysterious stories that are mystery stories in all appearances, fulfilling the characteristics and expectations of the genre. However, where archetypal mysteries are labyrinthine but definite, moving in a twisting but single line, like a loopy piece of string, towards a happy, tied-with-a-bow, conclusion, here the assumed trajectory fails the reader and the seeking protagonist, as straight paths have the habit of turning into Mobius strips, the detective and the idea of detection challenged and countered by either the sheer volume of life's discrete details, or the trouble of producing/understanding a life. The seemingly unrelated trio of stories, strung together (as the reader halfway through is apt to think) almost precariously by the sole theme of an obsessive, messy search for Something, abruptly click into place with the rapidly of a well-oiled door. This book asks for the reader's patience and attention to the very end - the reader is encouraged to hold and withhold questions and doubts; it is in "The Locked Room" that everything falls together with quiet, final, brilliance. In what does not, in those jagged edges and gaps that fact and documentation do not seam and fill, are plainly fictions, this Trilogy openly admits, or, as I have come to think of it as I reached the last page, a ghostly shell of a house haunted by questions.