The Detective and the Author: City of Glass

The Career and Critical Reception of Paul Auster

“…In particular, its subversion of the rules of the highly‐codified detective genre aligns it with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980), at a time when critics like Brian McHale and Stefano Tani were theorizing the affinity between the departure from epistemological concerns of anti‐detective fiction and the interest in post‐cognitive questions – what McHale calls the ‘ontological dominant’– that characterizes a postmodern sensitivity. Unsurprisingly, most of the critical works on the Trilogy pursue these lines of inquiry, seizing on the connection with mystery and crime writing in Auster’s foray into fiction as an entry point into the analysis of the three narratives and/or drawing on poststructuralist theory and deconstruction to highlight his postmodern meditations on authorship and writing: see Russell (1990), Rowen (1991), Sorapure (1995), Nealon (1996), Swope (1998), Chapman and Routledge (1999) and, less determinedly focussed on the anti‐detective aspect of Auster’s work, Lavender (1993), Little (1997), Jarvis (1998), Zilkosky (1998), Bernstein (1999) and Millard (2000). Even relatively recent articles – see Swope (2002) and Dimovitz (2006), for instance – have continued to approach the Trilogy as an exemplary model of postmodern anti‐detective fiction, and it is worth remembering that the first single‐authored book‐length study of Auster – The New York Trilogy: Whodunit?…”

The ghost in the mirror: Notes on Paul Auster’s Ghosts

“…For an insightful reading of Auster's dismantling of the traditional tricks of detective fiction, see Sorapure (1995).…”