BOOK 155: THE NEW YORK TRILOGY: PAUL AUSTER
Originally published sequentially
as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since
been collected into a single volume.
Ostensibly presented as detective fiction, the
stories of The New York Trilogy have been described as "meta-detective-fiction",
"anti-detective fiction", "mysteries about mysteries", a
"strangely humorous working of the detective novel", "very
soft-boiled", a "metamystery" and a "mixture between the
detective story and the nouveau roman",
This may classify Auster as a postmodern
writer whose works are influenced by the "classical literary
movement" of American postmodernism
through the 1960s and 70s. There is, however, "a certain coherence in the
narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and a show of responsibility for
social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and
subversive elements" which distinguish him from a "traditional"
postmodern writer. The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern
detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel
(the classical and hardboiled
varieties, for example) but also creates a new form that links "the
traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and
ironic features of postmodernism."
ADAPTATIONS: City of Glass was
adapted in 1994 into a critically acclaimed experimental graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.
It was published as City of
Glass: A Graphic Mystery in 2004.
In 2009, Audible.com produced an
audio version of The New York Trilogy, narrated by Joe Barrett, as part of its Modern
Vanguard line of audiobooks.
In 2016, Edward Einhorn adapted City
of Glass as a play Off-Broadway, at the New Ohio.
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