The New York Trilogy

Read The New York Trilogy Online

Authors: Paul Auster

Paul Auster

The New York Trilogy

city of glass
ghosts
the locked room

Introduction by
luc sante

Praise from Around the World for
The New York Trilogy

“By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have initiated a whole new round of storytelling.”
—
The Village Voice
(USA)
“In his vivid modern New York the energies of literary creation are brought vitally alive, in a great American tradition.”
—
The Sunday Times
(England)
“A stunning, hypnotic book … Auster’s virtuosic storytelling achieves a tone at once passionate and detached, and the result is as curious as it is convincing.”
—
The Glasgow Herald
(Scotland)
“One of the great revelations of American literature in recent years … Auster has talent to burn.”
—L
‘Express
(France)
“Paul Auster is a writer of rare intensity.” —
El Correo Gallego
(Spain)
“A breathtakingly intense and nerve-wracking book, a game of life and death … This is strong stuff—hold onto your seats.”
—
Elstra Bladet
(Denmark)
“Paul Auster’s taut and remarkable prose works have enriched the American literary tradition.”
—
De Groene Amsterdammer
(Holland)
“Auster is one of the most inventive writers of his generation.”
—
Corriere della Sera
(Italy)

“Paul Auster has written a sublime and clear-as-glass book, a book of almost frightening transparency and openness, a crystal that refracts light into colors that have rarely been seen before.” —Jan Kjaerstad (Norway)

penguin classics deluxe edition
THE NEW YORK TRILOGY
PAUL AUSTER is the author of the novels
The Brooklyn Follies
,
Oracle Night
,
The Book of Illusions
,
Timbuktu
,
Mr. Vertigo
,
Leviathan
(awarded the 1993 Prix Medicis Étranger),
The Music
of Chance
(nominated for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award),
Moon
Palace
, and
In the Country of Last Things
. He has also written two memoirs (
The Invention of Solitude
and
Hand to Mouth
), a collection of essays, and a volume of poems, and edited the book
I Thought My Father Was God
:
And Other True Tales from NPR’s
National Story Project
. He has won literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose, and in 1990 received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote the screenplays for
Smoke
,
Blue in the Face
, and
Lulu on the Bridge
, which he also directed. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

LUC SANTE’s books include
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New
York
and
The Factory of Facts
. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

penguin books

p e n g u i n b o o k s
Published by the Penguin Group
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City of Glass wa
s first published in the United States of America by Sun & Moon Press 1985
Published in Penguin Books 1987
Ghosts wa
s first published by Sun & Moon Press 1986
Published in Penguin Books 1987
The Locked Room wa
s first published by Sun & Moon Press 1986
Published in Penguin Books 1988
Edition with three works in one volume published in Penguin Books 1990

This edition with an introduction by Luc Sante published 2006

City of Glass
copyright © Paul Auster, 1985
Ghosts
copyright © Paul Auster, 1986
The Locked Room
copyright © Paul Auster, 1986
Introduction copyright © Luc Sante, 2006
All rights reserved

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, through a grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts and through contributions to The Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc.

p u b l i s h e r ‘ s n o t e
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 1-4295-3631-4 CIP data available
       
     Contents
Introduction
Paul Auster has the key to the city. He has not, as far as I know, been presented with the literal object, traditionally an oversized five-pound gold-plated item, dispensed to visiting benefactors and favored natives on a dais in front of City Hall by a functionary in top hat and claw hammer coat, but I doubt he needs one of those. Auster’s key is like the key to dreams or the key to the highway. It is an alchemical passe-partout that allows him to see through walls and around corners, that permits him entry to corridors and substrata and sealed houses nobody else notices, as well as to a field of variegated phenomena once considered discrete, but whose coherence Auster has established. This territory is a realm within New York City, a current that runs along its streets, within its office buildings and apartment houses and helter-skelter through its parks—a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap, perhaps invisible but inarguably there, although it was never identified as such before Auster planted his flag.
Auster’s characters peregrinate along this corridor as if it were a moving sidewalk, or like the dream subway devised by the cartoonist Ben Katchor, which stops in individual apartments. Quinn, in
City of Glass
, and Blue, in
Ghosts
, both stumble into it, to their enlightenment and discomfiture, and the unseen Fanshawe, in
The Locked Room
, has gone to live there—the question is whether any of them is able to emerge from it. If you have spent time in New York City and fully engaged with the place, chances are that you will have caught glimpses of that space-time continuum. You will have noticed certain cryptic graffiti, certain glossolaliac manifestos crammed onto photocopied sheets that you did not understand because they were written in the language of that slipstream. You will have wondered about various street characters—itinerant performers and site-specific eccentrics and inexplicable middle-of-the-night apparitions—who are, it turns out, commuters from that realm into the workaday world. But it may be, in fact, the essence of the city, while what passes for the city in the average experience is nothing more than a thin coat of paint.
Auster’s characters know that you can practice a form of divination by reading the sidewalks, that capricious telephone calls can link people in ways that may seem random but end up sealing their fates, that you can pass through the streets completely unseen while making no special effort to disguise yourself or hide, that you can pass through your life in the city without leaving any more of a mark than if you had never been born, that you probably have a double out there somewhere among the eight million whose life runs such a close parallel to yours that the lines never converge—although if they ever do: beware. These things prove that the city has been around for millennia, although it was not always located at the mouth of the Hudson River, or even in North America. It was not even always a city. For a long time it was known as a forest. It was, in fact, the primeval forest, inhabited by trickster foxes and stolid pigs and woebegone wolves and the occasional shape-shifting human, but it was recognizably the same labyrinth of chance.
The chief difference between Auster’s city and that forest is that the trees have become buildings and their leaves have become paper. The paper is covered with writing and gathered into manuscripts and notebooks, of preference red. Some of these are eventually transubstantiated into printed books, but often they subsist as manuscripts and notebooks, which usually find a readership of one besides their authors. Their contents are often cryptic, often coded, sometimes dull, sometimes so disturbing that their readers cannot responsibly give an account but can respond only by destroying them. Those manuscripts and notebooks that cannot be published usually have the deepest connection with the truth, and that truth is either arcane and difficult to perceive or else it is painful enough to be considered an abomination.
Fates pivot on these unread texts, which are in each case the focus or the result of an inquiry by a metaphysical detective. These detectives may bear a superficial or circumstantial resemblance to the classic detectives of the eponymous genre of fiction—about the same kind of resemblance that those characters in turn have to actual workaday investigators—but in essence Auster’s detectives are pilgrims, questers. They would be more immediately recognizable in the forest, striding along with staff in hand and bindle on back, maybe whistling to keep the shadows at bay. And like the blameless pilgrim who ventures forth into the forest with resolve but not without qualms, the detective ultimately finds that his mission has led him through the labyrinth on a path that describes an irregular circle.
There is also an author, who appears in each of the novels, who may or may not be called “Paul Auster” and may or may not share personality traits or biographical elements with the person whose name appears on the spine. He is, in the finest tradition, merely a witness, moved to transmit the story while maintaining a measured reserve. Or is he perhaps the central character, setting up a lookalike as a blind to cover the degree of his involvement? Auster encourages this line of speculation, which is a labyrinth of another sort and bears a pedigree which—as he reminds us, riffing under his own name on the conundrum of Don Quixote—far predates postmodernism. If the city is a forest and the detective is a pilgrim, the author is a pilgrim as well. He is the one who makes it out alive, who can exchange his story for supper and a bed of straw.
There have been, in two hundred years, a great many novels and stories set in New York City, but until Paul Auster’s trilogy no one had made a serious effort to demonstrate its extreme antiquity, its surface flimsiness compared to its massive subterranean depths, its claim on the origins of stories far older than written culture. But now we know, and that truth will inhere no matter how many times the city is reconfigured and how thoroughly living memory is banished from it. Auster, who owns the key, makes its use available to all readers.
City of Glass

1
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.

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