THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (BY) PAUL AUSTER

Published 1990, 308 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I first read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy two years ago, I did not know what to make of it.  It's a purposefully obscure book, with each of the three interconnected novellas offering its own difficulties, despite each telling similar stories.  I thought I liked it, but I could not have told you specifically why.  To appreciate the Trilogy, you should probably enjoy detective fiction, meta-narratives, elaborate, abstract metaphors and writers writing about writers writing about writers (often with more layers and levels than Inception).  After this second read of the Trilogy, I still can't claim to understand everything that Auster was trying to convey, but I can say that the New York Trilogy is probably now on my list of favorite books. It's difficult, it's depressing and bleak, it's slowly paced and full of possibly impossible riddles, but Auster writes with confidence and deliberation that few other writers can match.  There is always the sense that he is simply that much cleverer than you — the Trilogy is willing to hold on to its secrets, but you could unravel them with enough effort.  As the narrator reiterates throughout, there is never a wasted word, never an insignificant thought.

It would be nearly impossible to describe the plot of these novellas without sabotaging the book's meticulous construction, but there are general themes and structures that hold each together.  Each story is, in a way, the same story: that of a detective stuck on a dull, uneventful case for such a long time that he eventually turns his analytical eye upon himself and faces an existential crises.  In two of the novellas, the "detective" is only a writer forced by chance to play the role of a private eye.  By necessity, then, nothing happens for long periods of time, so it's easy to see how some could become bored with this.  (It's almost inevitable that you will be frustrated, if not bored — I certainly was, even the second time around).  The Trilogy has all the trappings of a noir at the start, but it's only a detective novel in the meta sense, turning the conventions and grittiness of noir on their end in order to unravel the identity of character, writer and reader.  It's a brilliant move by Auster, and though the book is certainly paced on the slower side, I was never once bored.  Everything is so carefully constructed, literally no image or abstraction is wasted.  It's certainly a complicated novel, but the narrative itself moves forward linearly, and it's never difficult to discern what's actually happening — it's only difficult to figure out the significance of what is happening.  The mysteries here are of a vague, internal sort, sprinkled with strange subplots and metaphorical overtones.  One side character is obsessed with the Tower of Babel, and a detective is forced to follow him on cryptic scavenger hunts throughout the city as this man attempts to create a new, perfect language.  In the second (probably most obscure and frustrating) story, every character is named after a color: Black, Blue, White, etc.  The narrator of the third story claims that he wrote the first two, and elements from each bleed into one another — sometimes names, mostly themes, and surely the anxiety each narrator faces.  Another winking discussion involves the true author and significance of Don Quixote, and its many implications — characters-as-writers and writers-as-characters, duplicity and subversion — likely serve as a linchpin to unraveling the meaning of the entire Trilogy.

Auster is as careful with his language as he is with his plotting, and his assurance that every obscurity has its secret meaning is what keeps the Trilogy from becoming another pretentious exercise in lazy ambiguity.  His workmanlike prose fits the style of the stories, and though I would call his writing poignant and sharp, it rarely tries to be beautiful on its own.  This is not a poetic novel, and Auster wisely refrains from stacking metaphors and similes upon each other in order to describe the difficult world of his characters.  The prose is descriptive, clean, precise, but grounded in reality, making the strangeness of the plots seem all the stranger.  In this sense, The New York Trilogy could almost be considered magic realism, a genre that should contrast sharply with noir.  Yet it works, mostly because Auster has something to say.  So much to say, in fact, that it doesn't seem to matter if you miss a lot of it.  Unlike a detective novel, it's not the specifics that are meant to add up.  It's the general feeling of unease, the realization that there's more than you can possibly keep track of, more details than you can make sense of — there is significance in this, not the specifics themselves.  The feelings that the Trilogy leaves are not comfortable ones.  This book is never graphic or disturbing in the conventional sense, and there's almost no violence at all, but certain scenes and thoughts left me feeling unsettled and unhappy, even horrified.  It would be easy to transpose those negative feelings back onto the novel.  But then, you realize what Auster has done.