“Ghosts” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
“Ghosts” is the second piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, a meditation on or perhaps a novel about detective fiction and New York City. It’s the shortest in the so-called trilogy, too short to call a novel itself, at 60 pages even shorter than Animal Farm or Heart of Darkness. But it is dense, compulsively readable, and eventually almost haunting. It starts with some obscure riffing: “First of all there is Blue. Later there is White, and then there is Black, and before the beginning there is Brown.” Let me explain. All the characters in this story are named for colors. The action (such as it is) takes place on Orange St. I don’t think Auster was making fun of Travis McGee novels, but it’s possible. Anyway, the opening has it right. The main character is a detective named Blue. A man named White (who may be disguised, wearing pancake makeup) hires him to follow a man named Black. In fact, White has already rented an apartment across the street from Black, where Blue can keep an eye on him directly. But mostly all Black does it sit at a table and write or, less frequently, read Walden. Black leaves his place once in a while for groceries or on other errands. The vigil is much like the one that ends the first entry in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” although this one is more comfortable. It lasts more than a year, and along the way Blue abandons a girlfriend without meaning to. It’s nearly as confusing as one of the unusual episodes with Black, where Blue witnesses what appears to be a breakup scene. But we get no further information about that. Or about why Blue abandons his girlfriend, for that matter. The tail job is very boring for Blue, but somehow fascinating for us as readers, much like “City of Glass.” I kept waiting for Auster’s deadpan style to slip into open mockery, but the color scheme of the character names is about as close as he gets to treating it like a joke. He does get at a certain emptiness, not just in detective fiction but extensible to all life, which is a pretty neat trick for something that has many earmarks of arch po-mo business. But there’s also an unmistakable sincerity to what Auster is doing here that carries it off well (unless he has actually fooled me). Also, perhaps most importantly, Auster is a good writer, slightly obsessed but lucid, and a pleasure to read.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
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