The New York Trilogy, by Paul Auster
I'm not smart enough to appreciate this book
(Review posted 23 May 2004 17:13:45)

Shortly after I finished the trilogy (comprising City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room), I saw that it was on the Guardian's list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. I don't think it's one of the 100 greatest novels of all time, but I do think it'd like to be.

The book is well crafted, the words fit together in pleasing ways. It seems likely that the author does pretty much just what he sets out to do. But.

Somewhere in the second book for instance I was feeling annoyed that it was really the same story as the first book only slightly differently told, as though the author had had an idea he liked and had thought of two different ways to tell it, and being unable to decide between them had decided that it'd be nice and postmodern to just write them both. And then in the third book I read "These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about." Yeah, okay, whatever. The book is (the books are) full of self-reference, of people obsessed with observation, with watching, with reporting and discovery. There are people whose names are colors, characters with the same name as the author, and all sorts of artful little knobs. But.

While the words are well-done, this is no "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist"; it's not just glittering prose for its own sake. There are people here, and they're an important part of the story, and it seems we're supposed to care about them. But I didn't; I wasn't convinced. Their motives, their obsessions, their sudden certainties and random and often irrational actions, seemed to be completely unmotivated, explicable only by virtue of a telepathic connection to, well, to the author, I guess, and not to anything that I recognized as plausible thoughts or emotions.

The book left me feeling that maybe, if only I were smarter or had put more effort into it, I might have seen myself or the people that I know somewhere in it, in the figure or the ground. But I didn't, and the book didn't work for me. I'm not sure how to figure out just whose fault that was.