Tommy's review of City of Glass
City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Paul Auster
Auster does not start his trilogy strongly. Interwoven with multiple themes and lacking a central moving force, City of Glass is a metropolis of many skyscrapers with few people to occupy them. Sparse at two-hundred pages, the novel shows how a good idea tends to sour when the author grabs too many grapes. Auster’s austere style, short sentences and plain imagery seduce the reader into believing that this is a one night read about a detective and a rich, wheelchair-bound client. But Auster has us all fooled. Soon we see it is all pretextual, this air of simplicity a cover for Auster’s covert deep endeavors.
Instead of writing the dime novel, Auster has decided to heap some of the more bulky, muscular questions of life, an author’s life in particular, onto this skeleton of a story. This not only heightens the potency of each word to allegorical levels, it leaves Auster little room for error. It’s not so much that Auster blunders, but anyone knows that when one carries a...more
Auster does not start his trilogy strongly. Interwoven with multiple themes and lacking a central moving force, City of Glass is a metropolis of many skyscrapers with few people to occupy them. Sparse at two-hundred pages, the novel shows how a good idea tends to sour when the author grabs too many grapes. Auster’s austere style, short sentences and plain imagery seduce the reader into believing that this is a one night read about a detective and a rich, wheelchair-bound client. But Auster has us all fooled. Soon we see it is all pretextual, this air of simplicity a cover for Auster’s covert deep endeavors.
Instead of writing the dime novel, Auster has decided to heap some of the more bulky, muscular questions of life, an author’s life in particular, onto this skeleton of a story. This not only heightens the potency of each word to allegorical levels, it leaves Auster little room for error. It’s not so much that Auster blunders, but anyone knows that when one carries a bundle of sticks long enough, even across relatively smooth terrain, some sticks are bound to fall. And some sticks are thornier than others.
Quinn, the novel’s protagonist, becomes embroiled in a relatively simplistic yet engaging gumshoe assignment, but very soon feels that he has become pulled into it as more than a detective. Soon, the case is circling around Quinn, rather than his clients. Then all the sticks begin to show themselves, and suddenly the reader is a bit overwhelmed. Quinn begins to appreciate that man is not divine, a weakness he simply can’t escape. A failed author himself, Quinn shows us plainly that his path in life may lead up or down, up toward the rich life of well-to-do author Paul Auster -- the character, mind you, not (necessarily) the author of this book, who shows Quinn the niceties a better book contract earlier in life may have brought him,– or down, toward the pitiful existence of the destitute madman he has been employed to trace. Quinn becomes obsessed, whether he realizes it or not, with understanding how life functions, by tracking down the Tower of Babel and its zany modern creator.
Images abound of this “up and down” motif: the yo-yo of the Auster character’s son, a toy Quinn can make fall, but not rise; the rise and fall of the Tower of Babel, both the one of the ancient tale and the New World one founded in downtown Manhattan. Still, as the lesson of the Tower taught, man cannot achieve the divine, no matter how tall his skyscraper. Eventually finding himself fallen alongside the homeless, powerless to expand his explorations of the path to the divine, Quinn simply disappears. Either way, up or down, it seems no one has a true sense of the divine. From the philoso-babble of character Auster to his foil, the abusive, fallen-from-grace Stillman, no one has any answers for Quinn.
And that’s fine, both in and of itself and as a theme for a book. And this is not a bad book by any means—it had me thinking about it for hours long after I had finished reading it sprawled out under the Washington Monument on the Fourth of July. But why complicate a perfectly complex book, I wondered, by fumbling in a web of relationships between the main character and both his multiple alter egos and the Auster/Auster character, none of which developed past infancy? We have the failed author Quinn; his pseudonym, William Wilson (a thinly veiled Walt Whitman (Quinn camps out on the block on which the real Whitman penned Leaves of Grass)); detective Max Work, the tough-talking character of the popular beach-reading Wilson novels, who Quinn idolizes; the character author Paul Auster, who is familiar not with Wilson’s Max Work stories but Quinn’s earlier, obscure, truer-to-the-literary-canon poetry he published under his own name. The characters meld together right from the start, when Quinn’s clients hire him believing him to be “Paul Auster.” The interrelationships between these personas, real and assumed, has no room to flourish in what is practically a novella. The reader is left confused, not so much as to who is who, but as to who wants to be whom.
I can’t fault Auster for trying to tackle great enigmas; I can critique him for loading cannons on a canoe. And every time one is fired, the canoe capsizes for a while, and the reader may not have the patience to try to right it, preferring instead to simply float unfulfilled toward the story’s quick end.. I think Auster—the real author, that is – deliberately offers little prescription on how to solve the eternal problems of authorhood (thank god he left the missile launcher on the dock!) but the reader does come away with the idea that all authors really do is live through writing. Just live and write—it’s as simple as that. Maybe a few too many wee morning hours wracking his brain over just how complicated his relations with his characters can become led Auster to set all those troubles down in words, words which any detective novel aficionado could follow. Or maybe Auster is just a sucker for an expanded haiku of a novel: few words, a waterfall of meanings. Either way, it’s only the first book in the trilogy, and sometimes the kinks of overambition work themselves out.
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