New York Stories – Paul Auster
A very stressful meeting to organise due to all of our hectic schedules. I think a few people were quite disappointed that they couldn’t make this one, and they were definitely missed. The book was Nicky’s choice, and a great one to discuss, with Auster turning the detective novel on its head in three very strange stories.
Overall, there was a really positive reaction within the group, with Nicky, Paddy and myself loving it and Ciara really liking it. Dan was a little more sceptical however. Paddy seemed surprised to like it so much, as he normally hates post-modern books. We disagreed over the significance of the use of the detective novel as the structure of the book. I really enjoyed the deconstruction of the traditional cliches of this style of writing. Nicky agreed, pointing out that private eye stories often have the most contrived plots of any genre, which Auster was able to play with in these stories. Paddy felt that Auster’s construction of the book as detective stories was a technique that he used to explore his themes, but didn’t say anything about the detective novel itself. Daniel agreed, feeling that this technique was used simply for the author to display his own intellectuality. Both felt that this was self indulgent, but Paddy didn’t mind this as much as Dan! Dan thought that the author didn’t need the plots that he created in order to explore the themes of the book.
Identity was the main theme of the book, with the boundaries blurred between the characters in the book, characters in books in the book, and authors and creators of these characters! We were interested in the way Auster stripped away the layers of his characters’ lives, looking at what lay beneath, and what they became. Paddy described all the protagonists as ‘blank slates’ – they certainly all seemed very passive, and did not have control over their lives, especially as their identities were broken down further and further by the author. I felt that Auster was exploring what it means to be an author; Nicky agreed, adding that he looked at the process of writing. She highlighted the significance of the red notebook, and the ripped out pages showing the lack of resolution in the stories. Dan thought that each of the stories were about the narrator, and that there were no other real characters in any of them.
Ciara highlighted madness and Nicky solitude as themes, which I thought linked in with the exploration of identity. The narrators of each story become more and more obsessive about the mystery that they are entangled in, becoming more and more estranged from their family and friends, often not even noticing that this has happened. None of the protagonists successfully resolve what they set out to do, but through this failure, and the loss of their previously established identity they become someone new.
Language and the loss of language was also a theme that ran through each story. The most obvious example of this was Peter Stillman’s philosophy, and the effect of this on his son, who had kept locked up in order to see how language would develop in isolation. Ciara felt that this was part of Auster’s method of stripping away identity and looking at what a ‘basic human’ would be.
I thought the the title ‘New York Trilogy’ was too prosaic and attempted to find some deeper significance than the fact they were all written in New York. I was unsuccessful. Everyone else seemed to think that it was a perfectly reasonable title, but I felt such a deep and complex book should have a more meaningful title. I didn’t think the stories said anything about the city in particular.
Overall, a definite recommendation!
