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It was a wrong number that started it – literally in the case of The New York Trilogy. In 1980, or thereabouts, Paul Auster twice answered the phone, only to hear a voice ask: “Is this the Pinkerton Agency?” (Pinkerton is a legendary American detective bureau.) He told the caller they had a wrong number, yet he was soon filled with regret. Here, surely, was a story: why hadn’t he asked any questions? But never mind. While a third call never arrived, in its place came inspiration. Out of the disappointing silence, Auster spun the first volume of his trilogy, City of Glass, a literary hall of mirrors that made him famous.
City of Glass was published in 1985. Nine years later, under the brilliant eye of Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli created a graphic adaption of the book, produced with Auster’s approval, and it was widely acclaimed as a work of art in its right. Only now, however, is the cartoon form of the trilogy at last complete. Ghosts, the second volume, has been drawn by Lorenzo Mattotti, an Eisner award-winning Italian comics artist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Le Monde, while The Locked Room is again the work of Karasik, a celebrated figure in comics (he began his career at Raw, the magazine run by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly). Both were overseen by Auster before his death in April last year, at the age of 77.
The New York Trilogy famously upends the traditional mechanisms of the detective story – its many influences include Raymond Chandler – with all manner of postmodern tricks. In the first of these adaptations, Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, is drawn into a real-life mystery. In the second, a private eye called Blue descends into madness, fatally flummoxed by the case on which he’s working. In the third, another writer – he may or may not be Auster – is creatively blocked, a situation he’ll perhaps fix by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend, Fanshawe. Their creators, in other words, have stuck pretty close to the source material.
But crikey, something alchemical has happened here too. I don’t know if it’s acceptable to admit that I would rather read this version of the trilogy than the original novels, but there it is: in my eyes, this is a stone-cold masterpiece, an instant classic that will be read for decades to come. Sketched in black and white, these books have a concise, noirish, cinematic feel, even as they’re hugely inventive, playing their own games when it comes to pace and scale: Quinn, who loves to walk, appears as a giant on a map of Manhattan; the unnamed narrator of the third book appears in miniature, sitting inside a suitcase that contains a Fanshawe archive.
Their depictions of writing, whether by typewriter or pen, are intensely satisfying (in The Locked Room, a drop of ink seems to contain a warped human face). Somehow, they go further than words, metaphorical labyrinths transformed into human brains, internal monologues wittily depicted as other activities (thinking is represented as digging a hole). Above all, the frames of a comic lend themselves so perfectly to Auster’s city setting and his stories’ themes of chance and loneliness. They bring irresistibly to mind doors and windows; a sense of what lurks unseen beyond apartment landings. Push against them, dear reader, and who knows what you’ll find.
