“The Locked Room” (1986)

The New York Trilogy
The third piece in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy makes a strong case that it is indeed a trilogy, with shared themes and tone. Auster also distributed various details across it—a detective and/or writer named Quinn, a red notebook, a character named Stillman, and more—that give it a somewhat deceptive sense of unity. I’m not entirely convinced Auster is that good at endings, but he’s certainly good at most of the rest. This is an even better mystery story than the first piece in the trilogy, “City of Glass,” though both go similarly off the rails. It seems to promise a locked-room mystery, a staple of the mystery / detective genre, but it is not a locked-room mystery at all. A locked room only appears near the end. Instead, this is another staple of the genre I like even more, when done well, which is the missing-person case, a disappearance. As with the rest of this trilogy it turns all questions into existential mysteries we can only ponder, never solve. The pondering is the solution. Thus, Fanshawe, the narrator’s childhood friend (I don’t believe we get a name for this first-person narrator?). Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind a wife, a son, and manuscripts that fill two suitcases. It’s hard to say why he has vanished. We do learn it is his own decision, not some crime. His manuscripts are popular and launch him into some upper realm of literary regard. The narrator marries Fanshawe’s widow—the public story is that Fanshawe is missing, presumed dead—and essentially enjoys all the fruits of Fanshawe’s work, including substantial royalties. But when publishers want him to write a Fanshawe biography and he gets a big contract his life starts to fall apart. Auster does not succeed in steering the genre everywhere he wants to take it, but he’s such a good writer, and can work so acutely well with the conventions, that he is rarely less than a pleasure to read. All three pieces in The New York Trilogy are perfectly enjoyable, even if the endings seem a bit muddled. Auster takes the genre conventions and works them well, exaggerating certain points absurdly, such as the vigils of shadowing suspects, adding whole new dimensions to the mystery story. It’s all arch and ironic and deserves all the “scare quotes” you can muster up. But it’s fun too and the kind of thing you might be inclined to gobble up in one or two sittings.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
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