On "The Locked Room" by Paul Auster ****

The last book of the New York Trilogy, The Locked Room is also perhaps the most traditional. Told from the point of a first-person narrator and essentially recounting a man's interactions with a strange childhood friend, the novel at first seems to have little in common with its two predecessors.

The narrator receives a call one day from a woman who has married his childhood friend Fanshawe. Fanshawe has disappeared, but he's left instructions to his wife that his friend should take over his literary estate. Fanshawe was a writer, though he never published. The narrator is to review the work, consider its worth, and then either destroy it or find a publisher. Like most who come in contact with Fanshawe, the narrator is a huge fan, and he is happily taken by the three novels, three plays, and book of poetry that Fanshawe has left behind--and so too is a publishing friend. (The narrator is a writer too, but one of the journalistic stamp, unable ever to break into the literary world.)

Meanwhile, the narrator falls in love with Sophie, Fanshawe's wife, and since Fanshawe had disappeared, he begins courting her. Until . . . He receives a letter from Fanshawe. The letter denotes that Fanshawe is alive, that he has made a decision to leave the world behind, and that he has given himself seven more years to life. He enourages the narrator to go forward with taking care of Sophie and his son.

The narrator is troubled by the letter but goes forward anyway. His troubles begin to overwhelm him, however, and he decides to revenge Fanshawe, to find him and kill him--or at least expose him. Meanwhile, others are claiming the narrator is Fanshawe, and to quell those rumors, the narrator agrees to write a biography of his friend, which is really just a means for him to find said friend.

Here's where the book begins to dovetail into the other two books of the trilogy. Names from the other book show up. There is a private detective named Quinn (from the first book); there is a man named Peter Stillman (also from the first book); there is a red notebook. (It turns out the narrator is the author of the first two novels of the trilogy.) There is an obsession with symbol, language, and meaning, and there is one particularly intriguing scene toward the book's end when the narrator finally confronts Fanshawe. It isn't Fanshawe, though (or is it?). It's a man who the narrator decides is Fanshawe, as if the decision, the application of meaning, is what matters--more than any meaning in and of itself. To decide a man is Fanshawe and act accordingly is what matters. So too with language and literature. We have a heap of words that we put the meanings to and that we go about in faith as if those meanings mattered.

Then, finally, of course, there's the locked room--the place we're not allowed to enter. But I won't get into that, because I can't. The novel won't let me. You'll just have to read and discover its contents for yourself.

On "Ghosts" by Paul Auster ***

The second book of Auster's New York Trilogy, this one is more of a philosophical journey than anything else, something to be enjoyed on an intellectual level but not much else. It explores similar themes as the first book in the trilogy, but fails to quite live up to the first. Had I read it first, perhaps my opinion would be slightly different, but somehow I doubt it.

In Ghosts every major character is named after a color. Blue is a detective who has been hired by White to follow Black. Brown is his idol, and it is to Brown that Blue appeals, only to find the advice disappointing, if not completely absent.

Black, Blue finds, does little more than write. Following him is boring. Blue sits and observes and writes about Black, who sits and writes and observes also. Blue becomes paranoid as the story goes on, wondering if perhaps White and Black are in cahoots. Has White actually hired Black and Blue? Blue begins to make stuff up about Black, in part because it's more interesting, but also to see what kind of reaction he'll get from White. Will White know? Do White and Black speak to one another?

As time goes on, Blue finds himself less and less interested in writing about Black and, indeed, writing at all. The writer is a detective of sorts, but that work is less than exciting at times.

On "City of Glass" by Paul Auster *****

This is possibly the best novel I've read this year, certainly the best in a long time. The first of a trilogy, I look forward to the next two parts of it. Auster's book was written in the mid-1980s. It's hard for me to believe that it is about thirty years old and that it took that long for me to get to. Novels like this were works written in the 1950s back in the mid-1980s, and they were classics of a sort. It's hard to believe this would now be essentially a classic, in that sense, tested by time.

The novel is about a writer--a writer on many different levels. Daniel Quinn is a the main character. He writes detective novels under the name William Wilson (the name of a baseball player for the Mets, and the name, I believe, of a character in a Poe story about a man with multiple identities). Wilson in turn writes about the detective Max Work (maximum work of literature?). Quinn receives an anonymous call. The caller is asking for Paul Auster, a private detective.

After a couple of calls, Quinn decides to pose as Auster. The woman on the line is looking for help protecting a man Peter Stillman from his father of the same name. The father experimented on Stillman at a young age, similar to experiments keeping young children in a room without language to see what would happen. The abuse did no good for the son, and the father, who was imprisoned for his evil doings, is fresh out of jail. The son needs protection.

Quinn's job is to offer said protection. He embarks on following Stillman Sr. around. Stillman has a double, and Quinn has to choose which one is real. Stillman walks his days away in patterns that suggest letters that suggest words. What does it all mean?

Quinn eventually finds the real Paul Auster, who is a writer, not a detective. The two sort of collude for a bit, but not well and not for long. And Quinn in turn finds his musings growing progressively shorter and more meaningless, as Stillman's whereabouts get harder to trace.

Language is a major theme of this book, as is identity. Even the body seems a major element of it--nudity is stressed quite a bit early on. It's as if the body is all that is real, as if language is a slippery attempt to define the meaning of who we are, to give those bodies identity.