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THE NEW YORK TRILOGY 
Review by Indramalar Satkunasingam
HE'S done it again. Master raconteur Paul Auster's tenth novel - The Book of Illusions - looks to be yet another best seller. Published last month in the United States and Britain, and a few months earlier in France, The Book of Illusions has won the hearts of reviewers, even those who were critical (perhaps overly so) of his previous novel, Timbuktu.
"Possibly his finest novel to date." "Elegant, finely calibrated . a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship", "a book with considerable pleasures, augmented by Auster's graceful, muted narrative voice" . are just some of the accolades Illusions has received after barely a month out in the market. (quotes from Bookmunch; an online review website and the New York Times respectively).
This response to Illusions somewhat harks back to that of The New York Trilogy - a compilation of three short but haunting metaphysical thrillers, published between 1985 and 1987, the book that first established Auster among literary critics the world over.
When The Trilogy came out in Britain, The Times of the United Kingdom reported that "Highbrow pundits hailed a breakthrough in contemporary fiction ...and the Trilogy leapt into the bestseller lists". The New York Times in turn labelled Auster "a talent to watch ...a writer who could tickle the brains of highbrow literary critics and spin a good yarn too".
So, what is all the fuss about?
Through his three thrillers -- City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room -- Auster reinvented the standard detective fiction genre, injecting existential and metaphysical elements which send his "detectives" not only on a quest to solve mysteries but, more importantly, for meaning in the world. Themes and ideas overlap in all three stories -- each starts off as a simple mystery of pursuit but the cat-and-mouse games soon become an exploration of identity -- the challenge of changing, or eliminating, one's identity.
In City of Glass, for example, the protagonist Daniel Quinn is a mystery novel writer who goes by the pseudonym William Wilson. The mystery begins when Quinn receives a telephone call on three consecutive nights from someone looking for "Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency". (At this stage we know this is not going to be your run-of-the-mill detective story).
On the first two nights, Quinn tells the caller he has dialled the wrong number but on the third night, Quinn succumbs to impulse and pretends to be Paul Auster, private investigator. Thus begins a surreal detective fiction with Quinn (as Paul Auster) assuming the role of his, or William Wilson's, fictional detective Max Work.
In his obsessed search for the truth behind the man he is hired to track down, Quinn gets lost in a search for his own identity. He realises after a while that although he has assumed the role of Max Work, life does not follow the conventions of one of his novels and his case does not follow the conventions of his fictitious cases. Soon fact and fiction become increasingly inseparable.
The premise may sound a little confusing but Auster is a master storyteller and he guides (and lures) his readers with his clear, graceful and sure prose. Suspense is an integral element in these stories but the anticipation is not so much towards the plot but the character -- readers are on the edge of their seats, wanting to know what's going to happen to Quinn. Plot progression is secondary.
The Trilogy was by no means Auster's first attempt at writing. After graduating from Columbia University with a Masters degree in 1971, 24-year-old Auster exiled himself to determine if he could be a writer. For three years, Auster lived in Paris in "utter penury", translating works of French writers, writing poems, literary essays and prose while at the same time engaging in "degrading and humiliating involvements" to earn some money -- he invented a card game called Action Baseball and tried to flag it at toy fairs, he wrote a detective thriller called Squeeze Play, among others. All along, he was desperately trying to find his voice.
In an interview with The Guardian, in 1999 Auster said, "I did it (Squeeze Play) to make money, that's all. It's not a legitimate book." However as chance would have it, the night before his father died (1979), the 32-year-old Auster, by "some miracle or mystery", churned out a prose poem called White Spaces _ a reflection on the gruelling reality of writing. The following morning, he got news of his father's death, which ironically fuelled his career as he was bequeathed some money.
For the first time in his life, Auster could afford to do nothing else but write. First was a reflection on his father called The Invisible Man and then an autobiographical fragment titled The Book of Memory (a section of The Invention of Solitude). Then came the Trilogy, and the rest, as we know, is history, as Auster has since proven himself a prolific writer churning out classic after classic, even dabbling in film (he wrote the screenplay for Smoke, Blue In The Face, and directed Lulu On The Bridge).
Though the Trilogy remains, in the eyes of many Auster fans, his most accomplished work, his subsequent novels are by no means less compelling or confusing. Other must-reads include The Music of Chance, Leviathan and Moon Palace.
What's compelling about Auster is his knack for crafting stories that are at once bizarre as they are real; characters who are often macabre and at the same time capable of deep tenderness. In a typical Austerian novel, you can expect plot twists and turns and then some more twists. All his stories have no real closure - simply because Auster intends for his readers to go on thinking long after the last page is turned.
As in City of Glass, a common thread in all his novels is the idea that a single moment can irrevocably change a life; through a chance meeting or phone call in Quinn's case.
"We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. People who do no like my work say the connections seem too arbitrary. But that is how life is," said Auster in an interview with the New York Times.
Deep.