City of Glass is a 1985 novel by Paul Auster, first published by Sun & Moon Press and later collected as the first book of The New York Trilogy. A crime writer named Daniel Quinn is mistaken for a detective called Paul Auster, takes the case, and follows a man through Manhattan until he loses the case, the apartment and himself.
| First published | 1985, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles |
|---|---|
| Collected in | The New York Trilogy, 1987 |
| Length | c. 130–200 pages, by edition |
| ISBN | 0140097317 |
| Genre | Anti-detective fiction; metafiction |
| Setting | Manhattan, 1980s |
| Narrator | Unnamed, first person, revealed in the final pages |
| Protagonist | Daniel Quinn |
| Adapted as | Graphic novel, 1994, by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli |
What it is
Auster wrote City of Glass in the early 1980s and it was turned down by a long run of publishers before Sun & Moon Press, a small Los Angeles house, brought it out in 1985. Two more short novels followed, Ghosts and The Locked Room, and the three were gathered as The New York Trilogy. That collection is the book most readers hold, which is why City of Glass is usually described as a first section rather than as what it was: a novel, published alone, that nobody wanted.
It takes the shape of a detective story and then removes, one at a time, every part that makes a detective story work. There is a client, a surveillance, a notebook and a suspect. There is no solution, no culprit and, by the last page, no detective. Readers who come to it expecting the machinery to close tend to feel cheated. Readers who notice that the machinery is the subject tend to read the other thirty-three books.
The story
Daniel Quinn is thirty-five, lives alone in Manhattan and writes mystery novels under the name William Wilson, borrowed from Poe. His detective is called Max Work. Quinn's wife and son are dead, and the book states this early and once, without elaboration.
The telephone rings after midnight. The caller wants the Auster Detective Agency and asks for Paul Auster. Quinn says he has the wrong number. The call comes again the next night, and on the third night Quinn says that he is Paul Auster and takes the case.
The client is Peter Stillman, a young man who was locked in a dark room by his father through the whole of his childhood, in a private experiment about the language people would speak if they were taught none. Stillman's father has been released from an institution and is expected in New York. Quinn is hired to follow him.
He follows him. Stillman senior walks Manhattan collecting broken objects, and Quinn maps the routes in a red notebook until the shapes of the walks begin to spell out words. The surveillance continues after there is anything left to observe, and then continues after the man is gone. Quinn goes looking for the real Paul Auster and finds a writer of that name with a wife and a young son, working on an essay about who actually wrote Don Quixote. The writer is not a detective and has never heard of the case.
What happens after that is the part readers argue about, and it has its own page. In outline: Quinn keeps the watch long past the point of sense, loses his apartment, ends up writing in the red notebook in an empty room, and the account breaks off when the notebook runs out. The narrator turns out to be a friend of the writer Paul Auster, who assembled the book from that notebook and says plainly that he does not know what became of Quinn. The novel runs to thirteen short chapters, taken one at a time in the chapter guide.
How it is built
The author is a character, and is not the author
A writer named Paul Auster appears inside the novel, married, with a son, at work on a piece of literary criticism. He is a character. Treating him as the author is the mistake the book is built to invite, and the essay he is writing—on the authorship of Don Quixote—is the novel telling you so out loud.
Three names, one man
Quinn writes as William Wilson, imagines through Max Work, and answers to Paul Auster. Each name is a real position: the one he publishes under, the one he thinks through, the one he acts as. The plot is what happens when he stops being able to get back to the first one.
The notebook
The red notebook is where Quinn records the case, and it is the only reason the reader has the story at all. Auster used the same object across the whole body of work, in fiction and outside it, and the motif has its own page in Auster Studies.
Flat sentences, exact quantities
The prose gives addresses, amounts and dates and refuses to give feelings. Nothing is described as devastating; a man sells a watch, or counts what is left, and the reader does the rest. This is the whole method, and it is easiest to see here because the book is short. Fifteen passages that show it are collected on the quotes page.
Who is in it
Five people carry the novel: Quinn; Peter Stillman the son; Peter Stillman the father; Virginia Stillman, who makes the arrangements; and the writer Paul Auster. The father and son share a name, which is not a slip and is not a coincidence—the doubling is the point, and it repeats across every level of the book. The full cast, with what each one wants, is on the characters page.
What it is about
Language and what happens when it stops working. Stillman senior's experiment is an attempt to recover a language in which words and things are the same, and his own speech is what that attempt costs. Quinn's decline runs the same course in a different key: he keeps writing after the writing has stopped referring to anything.
Chance, which is Auster's permanent subject. The case arrives by a wrong number. Nothing that follows is caused by anything Quinn does; it is caused by a misdialled telephone, and the book never softens that.
Identity as something you can be talked out of. Quinn assumes a name as a convenience and cannot get out of it. By the end there is no one left in the room to have a name. All three run through the rest of the book, and they are followed further on the themes and symbols page.
The graphic novel
Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli adapted City of Glass as a graphic novel in 1994, with Mazzucchelli drawing. It is not an illustrated edition. The adaptation finds visual equivalents for the book's formal problems—the grid of panels does work that the prose does with repetition—and it is studied in its own right. It has a separate page here, because it has separate readers.
Where it sits
On its own, City of Glass is a novel about a man who disappears into a job. It is also the first of three. Ghosts comes next and tells a version of the same story with the characters cut down to colours, and The Locked Room tells it a third time, with people you can believe in. The three share no plot, so nothing is spoiled by reading them out of order. What they share is a shape, and by the third book Auster more or less admits it.
If you've never read anything by Auster, this is a great starting point. Around 130 pages, a fast-moving plot, and it is a good representation of what makes Auster's writing stand out.
What to read next
Straight on to Ghosts, if the ending worked on you. The Invention of Solitude, if the father and son did. The Book of Illusions, if you want the same method—the flat factual sentences, the chance event that sets everything going, one man taking apart the life of another—but with an ending that closes.