The New York Trilogy- Paul Auster
February 2024
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy bends detective fiction into a labyrinth of existential puzzles. Comprising three loosely linked novellas—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—the stories follow writers-turned-sleuths chasing shadows: a reclusive author, a pair of voyeuristic private eyes, a missing friend. But the real mystery here is identity itself. Auster’s New York is a hall of mirrors where characters lose themselves in roles, aliases, and the act of writing, blurring the line between hunter and hunted, reality and fiction.
The trilogy thrives on paradox. Quinn, the protagonist of City of Glass, becomes so consumed by surveilling a stranger that he erases his own life; Blue, in Ghosts, spirals into madness while staking out a man named Black. Auster strips the noir genre of its glamour, leaving bare the absurdity of seeking “truth” in a world where meaning is slippery and self-invention is survival. Even the city feels like a character—bleak, isolating, yet charged with a strange, cerebral energy.
More meditation than thriller, the book grapples with obsession and the loneliness of creation. Auster’s prose is cool and precise, layering metafictional tricks without losing emotional heft. It’s divisive—some may find it pretentious, others may revel in its intellectual gamesmanship—but its haunting questions linger: How do stories define us? Can we ever truly know anyone, even ourselves? Unsettling, cerebral, and defiantly unresolved, it’s a cult classic for overthinkers and lovers of literary noir.
Again recommended by my brother. It’s an absolute classic, and I am upset that I had not read any of Auster’s other work until now. A total mind-game from start to finish. I would highly recommend.