Ghosts is a 1986 novel by Paul Auster, first published by Sun & Moon Press and collected in 1987 as the second book of The New York Trilogy. A detective named Blue is hired by White to watch a man named Black from a rented room on Orange Street, Brooklyn, in 1947, and the watching becomes the plot.
| First published | 1986, Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles |
|---|---|
| Collected in | The New York Trilogy, 1987 |
| Length | 96 pages (Penguin edition) |
| ISBN | 014009735X |
| Genre | Anti-detective fiction; metafiction |
| Setting | Orange Street, Brooklyn Heights, 1947 |
| Narrator | Third person throughout, close on Blue |
| Protagonist | Blue |
| Origin | Reworked from an unproduced play Auster wrote in the 1970s |
What it is
Auster followed City of Glass with Ghosts, published by Sun & Moon Press in 1986. A third book, The Locked Room, appeared the same year, and the three were gathered as The New York Trilogy in 1987. Ghosts is the shortest of the three, 96 pages in the standard Penguin edition, and the one built with the fewest parts.
Four people carry the book, and none of them has a name a reader could use outside its pages: Blue, White, Black, Brown. The device removes the texture a name usually carries, hometown, family, physical description, and leaves only function: the watcher, the client, the watched, the one who trained the watcher. City of Glass gave its detective three identities to lose. Ghosts gives him one, a colour, and takes away everything else.
Readers who loved City of Glass for its detective-story shell often find Ghosts thin by comparison: less plot, fewer named people, no notebook filling up with clues. Readers who loved City of Glass for what it did to that shell tend to find Ghosts the purest statement of the same idea, and the book in the Trilogy they reread first.
The story
Blue is a private detective, trained years earlier by a man named Brown, and hired at the book's opening by a client named White to watch a man named Black. The room Blue rents for the job looks across the street to Black's window, on Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights. The year, stated once early on, is 1947.
Black does almost nothing worth a report. He sits at a desk and writes. In the evenings he reads a copy of Thoreau's Walden, and Blue, unable to make sense of a case with no action in it, buys his own copy and reads it too, twice, to see what he is missing. The watch runs close to a year. Blue starts filing reports out of habit rather than information, neglects the woman he is engaged to, and starts wondering whether White and Black might be the same man paying to watch himself.
The end of the book has its own page, since the ending is most of what readers ask about. In outline: Blue confronts Black, the two men fight, Blue takes the manuscript Black has been writing and leaves the room for good. What was in the manuscript, and what happens to either man afterward, the novel does not say. The whole case, start to finish, runs on the summary page.
How it is built
Four colours, no other characters
Ghosts grew out of an unproduced play Auster had written in the 1970s, three people confined to a room, built around a man listening to a report compiled about him. Rebuilding it as a novel, Auster kept the enclosure and reduced the cast to four names, each a colour: Blue, White, Black, Brown. Nobody in the book has a surname, a hometown or a physical description beyond what the plot requires. The result is a detective story with the psychology sanded off, function standing in for character at every turn. A fuller account of the cast is on the characters page.
Thoreau instead of Cervantes
City of Glass ran its plot against an essay on the authorship of Don Quixote. Ghosts runs its plot against Thoreau's Walden, the book Blue watches Black read and then reads himself. Thoreau's subject is a solitary, near-monastic life and what it costs the person living it. Blue's stakeout is Walden's isolation with the rent still due.
The shortest book, on purpose
At 96 pages, Ghosts is the shortest of the three books in the Trilogy. The compression is not an accident of the drafting. It is the argument made a second time, with less material left standing to make it.
Who is in it
Four names carry the book. Blue is the detective, and the character the reader follows on every page. Black is the man he is paid to watch, who spends his days writing and reading and gives no outward sign of noticing the surveillance. White is the client who hires Blue by letter and by messenger, and is never seen in person before the case ends. Brown trained Blue in the trade years earlier and appears only in memory. What each one wants is set out in full on the characters page.
What it is about
Identity reduced to a colour and a function. Auster strips the cast down until nothing is left to hold a personality apart from what each character does in the plot, and the stripping is itself the argument: watch someone long enough, in a book this bare, and the watcher and the watched start to trade places.
Isolation as method, not backdrop. Blue's stakeout borrows its shape from Walden, one man alone in a room, watching, keeping a record, and the novel asks what that kind of solitude does to a person who did not choose it for its own reasons. The room, the record and the double recur across Auster's other books.
Watching as a version of writing. Blue's reports to White are their own kind of authorship, a document built out of another man's days, and the manuscript he eventually takes from Black is the same thing built the other way around. A longer account of the colour scheme and its symbols runs on the themes page.
Where it sits
Ghosts sits between two more crowded books. City of Glass gives its detective three names and a city full of incident to lose them in. The Locked Room gives its narrator a marriage, a career and people he has to answer to. Ghosts gives Blue a room, a window and a colour, and builds the whole book from that.
This is the novel in the Trilogy readers are most likely to put down. It has the least plot, the fewest named people and the flattest incident of the three, and readers who came to City of Glass for its detective-story pleasures often stop here. It works best for readers who came to City of Glass for the opposite reason, to watch Auster take a form apart, and who want to see how far the same operation goes with almost nothing left to remove.
What to read next
Straight on to The Locked Room, which closes the Trilogy and gives the same material a narrator with a life and a stake in the outcome. Back to City of Glass, if this is a second read and the shape shared by all three books is what interests you now. If this is your first Auster book, start with City of Glass instead—the case for reading order is set out on that page, and Ghosts reads better as a second book than a first.