The New York Trilogy: "City of Glass", "Ghosts" and "Locked Room" Book

Originally published as three separate novels, Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy has since been published as a single volume that collects together three masterful stories that wonderfully, impressively, and entirely unexpectedly relate to each other. Auster's ability to connect the three seemingly stand-alone stories is absolutely astounding, and will leave you wondering how on earth such a talented writer has escaped larger recognition in mainstream literature.

Auster himself has been described as many things; a postmodern writer, a metafictional writer, an experimental writer, a realist writer, a detective fiction writer. His work is by far one of the most elusive to describe I have come across, that I personally would rank as some of the best literature that has come out of America in the second half of the 20th Century.

The New York Trilogy is divided into three separate stories: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Each is fantastic on their own, and their brilliance is only enhanced when connecting them together, as this volume enables the reader to do. At the heart of each of these three stories lies a problem that needs solving, which is why Auster's work is often referred to as detective fiction. But it is easy to see that its reach goes far beyond the boundaries of detective fiction too.

City of Glass begins with a phone call in the dark. Ominous and haunting, that phone call ushers into this dark world of Paul Auster. The protagonist, Daniel Quinn, picks up the phone to hear someone asking after a Mr. Paul Auster - in true postmodern style, Auster embeds his own name within the novel - and saying they need this man's help. Quinn, a detective fiction writer seeking something more, takes it upon himself to take up this persona of Paul Auster, private detective, and we follow him through the case that ensues, trying to protect a man scared for his life, worried that his own father is set out to kill him.

Ghosts is a fascinating story of another detective, a private eye by the name of Blue. Just like in Quentin Tarantino's brilliant cinematic debut, Reservoir Dogs, the protagonists of Ghosts are known not by their real names, but by their colour-themed aliases. Our hero, Blue, trained by the older Brown, is hired by White to investigate the comings and goings of Black, who lives on Orange Street. Superficially, one might think that the colours might get confusing, but it is very easy to immerse yourself in this highly creative world and follow the different characters in an incredibly intriguing plot. Blue doesn't know, nor does he ask, exactly what White's reasons are for wanting Black to remain under surveillance, and it is far from obvious what those reasons might be based on Black's actions. But we slowly but surely start to see potential connections between Ghosts and City of Glass, and things start to get extremely exciting to read as they do.

Such connections start becoming more and more clear through the course of the final novel, The Locked Room. The protagonist of this final novel is a writer unable to produce his own work, plagued by writer's block. He finds, however, that his childhood best friend, Fanshawe, has done precisely what he can't, and he decides that when Fanshawe voluntarily disappears, he will publish the work as his own.

It is hard to describe precisely how the three novels connect to each other without spoiling the surprises that are utterly delightful to discover whilst reading, and so I shall leave the precise details of the relationships between all three novels for you to discover on your own. The New York Trilogy is a fascinating and intriguing work of three novels that are sure to be unlike any other trilogy that you've ever read. Auster is clearly in a league of his own on this literary front, able to produce something that is beyond astounding. How he manages to devise these three separate but inter-linking worlds, each with their separate and over-arching plots, is almost incomprehensible, and certainly it is one of the finest pieces of fiction I have come across to date.

The New York Trilogy is perhaps not the lightest of works to read, but as we are now coming out of the summer season, light beach-reading is no longer what many of us are looking to read, and thus The New York Trilogy is perfect to pick up as we head into autumn. It is truly a stroke of genius on Auster's part that bears no worthy comparison in the literary world. It will be like nothing you have ever read, pulling you into a world you won't soon want to leave, and what more can we ask of a book?