METAPHYSICAL MYSTERY
TOUR
By Toby
Olson
CITY OF GLASS The New York Trilogy. Volume
One.
By
paul Auster.
203 pp. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press.
$13.95.
IN Paul Auster's remarkable
''City of Glass,'' the ostensible mystery drives from the book's odd and often
strangely humorous working of the detective novel genre. The real mystery,
however, is one of confused character identity, the descent of a writer into a
laby-rinth in which fact and fiction become increasingly difficult to separate.
The city of the title is New
York, the only truly constant character in the book, and it is the fate of this
city to be walked through and interpreted by the writer Quinn and the
philosopher and former convict Stillman. Quinn has been hired to follow
Stillman, to prevent him from murdering his son. In the beginning the city is
transparent, a place of light and air in which Quinn can stay outside of his
mind's tortured concerns, concentrating on neutral details. Later is is
reminiscent of that wasted city in Nathanael West's ''Miss Lonelyhearts,'' a
place begging for interpretation and order. Always its reflects Quinn's and
Stillman's search for arcane truth or psychological peace.
Quinn writes mystery novels
under a pseudonym, and as ''City of Glass'' begins, with a wrong number, ''the
voice on the other end asking for someone he was not,'' Quinn is drawn into an
actual world of mystery where he begins to take on the characteristics of his
fictional detective, Max Work. Early on, we learn what Quinn likes about
writing mystery Novels and reading them: ''In the good mystery there is nothing
wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant.... Since everything seen
or said, even the lightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the
outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked.... The center of the book
shifts with each event that propels it forward.'' * * * As the story of Quinn's
case develops, taking up issues as diverse as language acquisitions and
biblical history, both he and the reader find themselves in a world in which
the possiblities of chance seem to be dissolving. ''Nothing must be
overlooked'' here either. Each detail, each small revelation msut be attended
to a significant. And such attention brings ambiguity, confusion and paranoia.
Is it important that Quinn's dead son has the same name as Stillman? What can
it mean that ''Quinn'' rhymes with ''twin'' and ''sin''?
One way in which ''the center
of the book shifts'' involves the reader's discovery that the anonymous phone
call Quinn receives is a call for the detective Paul Auster, the identity Quinn
takes on as he enters the confusion of the case. When Mr. Auster himself enters
the novel, we cannot even be sure who the author of this mystery might be.
In ''City of Glass,'' Mr.
Auster's prose shifts its essence in the same ways that the accumulation of significant
events shifts the reader's focus. At times the prose is transparent, at others
it humorously calls attention to the mystery novel genre with light parody.
''The woman was thirty... hips a touch wide, or else voluptuous, depending on
your point of view; dark hair, dark eyes, and a look inthose eyes that was at
once self-contained and vaguely seductive.'' Always the prose moves with grace
and sureness, and the reader is moved along briskly. Even in its difficult and
complex discussions, the book is a pleasure to read, full of suspense and
action.
''City of Glass'' is the
first volume of ''The New York Trilogy.'' Though Mr. Auster is best known for
his essays (''The Invention of Solitude'') and editing (''The Radnom House Book
of Twentieth-Century French Poetry''), one can only wait with much anticipation
for the second installment of this strange and powerful new adventure in his
art.
Toby
Olson's books include ''Seaview'' and the forthcoming novel ''The Woman Who
Escaped From Shame.''
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