It seems entirely appropriate and in keeping with the themes expressed in his work that I first encountered Paul Auster’s quite by chance. One Sunday afternoon in September last year, I was preparing a meal for the family whilst listening to some music on the portable CD player in the green room. I can’t recall the album in question now. It may well have been something I was working on at the time. It could well have been something for pure pleasure or perhaps to act as aural barbed wire to deter the casual from entering.
If that seems a little extreme, then I confess that when I work in kitchen, I prefer it to be a solitary experience. Yet all of this really doesn’t matter. What’s important here is that whatever it was I listening to no longer caught my interest or ear and I flicked the function button from CD to Radio.
That randomly-timed act brought me into Radio 4’s
Bookclub , a monthly show where writers discuss their work with an invited audience. The programme had already started and the first voice I heard was that of the author reading from his novel, The New York Trilogy. The book, written in 1980, had begun after Auster had received a telephone call asking for the Pinkerton Agency. He assured his caller that they had a wrong number and hung up. “The next day, the phone rang at around the same time,” Auster told Radio 4’s James Naughtie, “the same person with the same question. And again I said no, you have the wrong number and I hung up. But the moment I hung up that second time, I said to myself , ‘You fool! Why didn’t you say you were the Pinkerton Agency and find out what the case might be about.’”
This inciting incident that led him to imagine a third call that in reality never came but in City Of Glass, propels the narrator Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, into a world far removed from his comfortable, though not untroubled, existence.
The programme finished and I carried on with the task in hand and quickly forgot about this intriguing world of wrong numbers, chance and mistaken identity. A few weeks later in our local branch library I recalled the story and though I’d forgotten the title I thought the name of the writer was Paul Oster.
Searching through the index for this name produced a blank, and it wasn’t until I was back home in the yellow room Googling, that I realised not ever having seen his name in print, Auster, to my ears had become Oster thus inadvertently rendering him a non-person. Looking back on it now, I have to say that mistake makes me smile given that portions of The New York Trilogy are given over to mistaken identity.
However, back then Auster wasn’t someone I’d ever heard of. He wasn’t in my must-read list and cash being tight, he wasn’t someone I was about to meet anytime quickly as my visits to bookstores had become a fairly rare event. Consequently, and no real surprise, Auster quickly disappeared from my view. Yet things change; events are set in motion in ways that we don’t always realise.
A couple of weeks ago I was waiting to meet Chris Wilson in Newcastle. I was early and killed a little time by visiting the Oxfam shop in St. Mary’s Place that specialised not in dead people’s clothes but books. Had Chris not arranged for us to be meeting, I would not have stepped into this book store anytime soon.
The very first book I saw when I entered the shop was The New York Trilogy. I really wanted it but only had my return fare to Whitley Bay. I found a seat and started voraciously reading as much of it as I could before nipping back out to keep my rendezvous with Chris.
Chris and I have known each other for a few years now but even this familiarity couldn’t mask my embarrassment as I asked to borrow the £2.49 needed to secure the book. Chris whipped out a crisp fiver from his wallet and I dashed along the street, fearing that someone would have bought in the intervening five minutes. Needless to say, the book had gone. I couldn’t believe my bad luck. A sales assistant sidled up to me commenting that I looked like I’d lost something. I mentioned the book to him. He smiled saying it had just been moved from crime section to the travel shelves by mistake. It had just come in that day and had been put out on the shelves only that afternoon. So, with Chris Wilson’s fiver, I snapped it up.
The three stories that make up the New York Trilogy – City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room – dwell to some degree on the kind of freak connectivity that frequently plugs us into that which seems disparate and remote.
Quinn, the central character of the first part of the triptych, becomes embroiled in duplicity, sleight of hand and shifting identity. Blue, the dependable sleuth of the second, realises that who watches and who is watched is all a question of perspective.
The nameless narrator of the third section takes on the wife and child of an old school friend who apparently disappears, leaving nothing behind mountains of unpublished manuscripts. Though physically gone, the body of the missing author’s work exerts a dark and distorting force on those he has left behind.
Though unrelated and capable of standing on their own, these stories are connected through veins of coincidence and flashes of remembrance that we can all recognise. They reverberate when we encounter them. Sometimes they seem preposterous, far-fetched even.
Yet I recall sitting in a kitchen of Jakko Jakszyk sometime in 2000, not long after we’d met each other, and discovering that Jakko had attended the same school, and at the same time as Debbie. And if that wasn’t jaw-dropping enough, he was in the same class as Debbie’s sister, Dude. Having met through a connection to King Crimson, Jakko and I were both shocked to discover an altogether more personal thread that had come to bind our lives together.
Auster’s calm measured prose persuades us to accept the paradox that though such occurrences are unusual they are also essential components of the everyday; simultaneously astonishing but also somehow, mundane. Though short on any kind of description, he draws his characters through action and their responses to increasingly extreme situations. In this way, we learn more about them than any florid prose might ever tell us. They are all given to the contradictory whims of obsessive personalities, pulling them into harm’s way, blinding them to what might actually be going on around them.
Though Auster adopts many of the conventions of detective fiction, the mysteries that generate and drive the narrative of The New York Trilogy often remain unsolved and just as enigmatic as when they first appear. There are no easy resolutions where the preceding events are neatly parcelled up for us. The reader, as much as the writer, is required to imagine the potential outcomes that may have evolved as a result of these chance encounters. Sometimes this feels awkward and even annoying, as in the case of the hapless Blue in Ghosts, who literally jumps ship on the story, deserting the reader when he might otherwise be telling us how it all worked out in the end. Yet this also increases the sense of puzzlement and aura of secrecy and ambiguity that pervades the work.
As far as I can tell, the second-hand edition I picked up in the Oxfam shop that night was published in 1992. The cover depicts a silhouette, literally a shady character, walking through a puddle. His footsteps cause ripples in the world reflected in that water. We see a New York skyline exploding outward, distorted and stretched to breaking point as the waves of cause and effect swell outwards from the point of impact. Given that part a prominent part of the skyline consists of the Twin Towers, the cover appears eerily prescient. Though this combination of images and world events are not directly linked, and are merely the product of chance, they resonate and bounce off one another to remarkable effect. Much like Auster’s writing.
Otherwise, greatly enjoying the stop-go proggy-funk of Lick by Julia Wolfe as performed on the Bang On A Can album Industry. What a little stomper it is!
