Tao of Pauly

City of Glass

I recently completed City of Glass, which is the first part of the New York Trilogy written by Brooklyn writer Paul Auster. He is also the author of Timbuktu. He wrote the screenplay for Smoke and Blue in the Face. And last Christmas, I blogged his most read work, “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story”.

This description appears on the book jacket of City of Glass: "As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he could have written."

Auster is a great storyteller. He maintains a constant pace throughout, never slowing up, but never speeding along to fast. He is able to describe specific aspects of the essence of New York City in remarkable detail.

Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs:

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk he felt as though he was leaving himself behind and by giving himself up to the movements of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. The world was outside him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to follow the drift of his own body. By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal, and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. New York was nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again."

The notion of identity underlines City of Glass. Quinn plays a writer, who writes detective stories under a pen name William Wilson. But he assumes the name Paul Auster, private detective, when someone mistakenly gets the wrong number and reaches Quinn instead. OK, I know it’s strange. Paul Auster (the author) uses the name Paul Auster as multiple characters in the book. It’s not as confusing as you think. Good read. Auster is one of my favorite NYC writers and I'm almost done with his second installment Ghosts.