THE GREY PLANE

Reviewed by Christopher Patrick Steffen

The detective genre, dangling like a slab of lamb over a pack of hyenas, has appealed to experimental writers since its nascence. What better analogy for existentialism than man on a prolonged journey to seek missing identities? While many of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers (see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michael Chabon, and David Markson) experimented within this genre, one of the premier examples is Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.

It is with deserved respect that this work catapulted Auster’s career into the mainstream. The work collects three novellas Auster wrote that all explore the protagonists’ identities and challenge the genre’s conventions. In the third, and in my opinion, the best of these works, The Locked Room, Auster breaks the fourth wall to outline an agenda, “The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about” (Auster, 346). Can one assumed that since the protagonist has become aware of the frame (The New York Trilogy) and named the two novellas prior to The Locked Room that Auster stepped in for the protagonist and pulled the curtain back? One can be skeptical, since the appearance of a poet named Paul Auster in City of Glass. By the third novella, the reader will be quite accustomed to questioning every detail revealed by the narrators.

Regardless of whether the three novellas are really the same story (and I would argue they are not), The Locked Room rewardingly ends the trilogy. This is the piece where Auster’s attention shifts to characters’ relations and interactions. In that way, this is the piece that becomes far more personal for the reader. While meta-critical experiments still take place, The Locked Room is far more about the universe of the characters than the questions that their existence imply. Read The New York Trilogy; read it with a pen and chock it full of notes. The language is beautiful. But if the experimentation and post-structural play immediately turn you off, make your way through The Locked Room. You will be well rewarded.