City of Glass by Paul Auster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The writer mentions Through the Looking Glass, and so glass means mirror. Why not call the novel “City of Mirrors”? Because that’s too obvious. I guess. This is my introduction to my review of the first novel in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.
A thousand years ago, or maybe fifteen or so, I interviewed P.J. Rondinone, a writer in New York who’d studied with Barthelme. We talked about how Rondinone took Barthelme’s stories and New-Yorked them, a legitimate enterprise, as Barthelme talked about when talking about Borges talking about Menard re-writing Don Quixote. Now, I’ve never read Don Quixote, so I didn’t know, at the time, that Cervantes himself claimed that Don Quixote was actually written by Cid Hemete Benengeli. I went on, myself to write a rewrite of Rondinone’s re-write; I office-cubicled one of his New-Yorked stories.
I’ll not be doing the same with City of Glass, this review notwithstanding. Paul Auster mentions Don Quixote in this novel, and his character Daniel Quinn is a New-Yorked Cervantes. Not a New-Yorked Quixote—Daniel Quinn is himself a writer, you see. And so is Paul Auster (the minor character in the novel). Daniel Quinn gets a phone call, a wrong number, falls through the mirror, and Alice-in-Wonderlands through his own creation: a New York of characters.
It’s a miasma, an existential mess, characters scattered by the god Auster (not the minor character in the novel) like mankind scattered at Babel. By the end, The writer gets mad at himself for not caring about his characters more, robbing them of hunger, taking away their sunlight, abandoning them, both literally and literarily.
A very expertly constructed and unsatisfying read.