The New York Trilogy, I: City of Glass

The New York Trilogy: City of Glass (2006 paperback)
by Paul Auster
USA, 1985
ISBN 0-14-303983-0

• "What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories." (City of Glass, p. 7.)

I read this novella as my New York state selection for the Book around the States Challenge, but I'm not totally satisfied with the choice. Sort of a metaphysical detective story, City of Glass is at its best playing with genre and authorial identity. The plot, offering a few novel twists on the narrative front, is promising. An author named Quinn, a writer of detective fiction hiding behind the Poe-like pseudonym of William Wilson, becomes involved in a mystery of his own when he receives a late night telephone call from a stranger who mistakes him for a detective named Paul Auster. Deciding to impersonate this fellow named Auster (himself also later revealed to be an author within the claustrophobic recesses of the work in question), Quinn takes the case on and descends down deep into the abysses of an NYC labyrinth of alienation and anomie as he trails his suspect across the uncaring Manhattan streets. Allusions to Borges, Don Quixote, and other metafiction exemplars help enrich the writer/reader relationship here, but the deconstruction/reconstruction of Quinn's identity crisis that takes place in the latter half of the story is just not all that exciting compared to the Cervantes-inspired paradigms that came before it. Imaginative but a bit of a letdown. (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)