Commentator Michael Cohen returns with another round of "Uncommon Mysteries" on Sounds Good. The first is also happens to be the first novel in The New York Trilogy, penned by Paul Auster. City of Glass, published in 1985, is considered a "soft-boiled, meta mystery" by critics, inspired by the postmodern movement in which the author himself is referenced as a character in the story. Drawing from Don Quixote, the private investigator struggles with madness, identity and reality.
Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
City of Glass became part of Auster’s The New York Trilogy, but each part of the trilogy can stand alone, and I want to discuss just this first part because it’s a handful by itself.
Auster’s story is a mystery about identity, language, and about how an author employs his own identity and language in telling a story. The mystery author in the story, who decides to impersonate a detective, pretends to be a man named Paul Auster. His client believes he is talking to Auster when he calls him on the phone, and he believes Auster to be a detective. At one point the mystery author goes to see Paul Auster and discovers him to be, like the real Paul Auster who is the author of this book, a writer who lives in a Manhattan apartment, who is married to a woman named Siri and who has a young son with the same first name, Daniel, as the mystery author. Auster is the only character in the book who is unequivocally named; the mystery author uses a pseudonym, the client tells us repeatedly that that is not his real name, and the narrator of the story, a friend of the character Paul Auster in the story, is never named.
The outline of the story seems fairly simple, if strange. A reclusive mystery author is contacted by a man who thinks the author is actually a detective. After first pointing out the mistake, the author then yields to the persistent would-be client, pretends to be a detective, and takes on the case, which involves protecting a young man named Peter Stillman. When a child, Peter Stillman had been locked up by his father, who had some crazy ideas about the possibility of a natural language, and the boy had grown to his teenage years without any human contact. Now rehabilitated, Peter Stillman fears that his father, about to be released from a prison for the criminally insane, will harm him.
The author/detective shadows the elder Stillman, but just as he believes he has determined that the man is genuinely and harmlessly insane, the elder Stillman disappears. The author goes to his client’s apartment and plants himself there, day and night, for months. Eventually he learns that the younger Stillman has long since moved out of his apartment and the elder Stillman committed suicide shortly after the author last saw him. Now the author stays in his ex-client’s apartment until he is sought out by the man who narrates the story, who finds that the detective manqué has disappeared.
There are other mysteries in which a detective fails at a case and the failure drives him off the deep end. Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Pledge, which was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, is an example. And Auster’s book is part of a general examination of the mystery genre by mainstream literary figures in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Writers like Umberto Eco, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others were fascinated by mysteries and attempted to use some of mystery’s conventions in their novels. You may be puzzled by City of Glass, but you may also like it.
Michael Cohen is Professor Emeritus at Murray State University. Cohen's newest book is A Place to Read, a collection of essays about seven decades of living and reading.
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