I first came across the name of Paul Auster earlier this year, while doing reading for Genre, and have just now followed it up (reading it in the gaps between doing other things over the last fortnight or so). The trilogy is made up of three inter-connected novellas, each bringing a slightly different perspective to bear on the theme of writing and the world. These tales of detectives and writers, constructions and disappearances, signs and meanings, are impeccably postmodern in their particulars, right down to the references to key texts from Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" to Don Quixote to Walden.
While doing research for my Genre paper, I came across Brian McHale's characterisation of the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a change in dominant from the epistemological to the ontological. He comments that this was particularly evident in detective fiction, and while I can't remember whether McHale discusses Auster in this connexion, it's an apt way of approaching the New York Trilogy - the nature of the detectives' investigations is continually shifting, as is the figurative ground under their feet, and these shifts occasion striking alterations in the realities of the world as they experience it.
This time round, I read these for pleasure (these themes fascinate me, after all), and I feel as if I've only scraped the surface of Auster's reflectively multi-faceted text-structures. The closing section of The Locked Room made my head spin with its bewildering juggling of signifiers and images from City of Glass and Ghosts, and especially with its sudden reorientation of the position of the reader and writer of all three books, and I suspect that it all fits together on a deeper level than I've yet properly thought through...needless to say, I enjoyed these very much.
