52 pages • 1-hour read
City of Glass
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Background
Authorial Context: Paul Auster
American author and filmmaker Paul Auster (1947-2024) was born in Newark, New Jersey, but spent much of his life in New York City, a location that deeply impacted his writing and views of the world. Due primarily but not exclusively to his most famous work, The New York Trilogy (of which City of Glass is the first book), he was dubbed “the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn” by the New York Times (Williams, Alex. “Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77.” The New York Times, 1 May 2024). However, he also spent considerable time living in France, where he worked translating French literature.
Although Auster published an earlier novella, Squeeze Play, in 1982, under the name Paul Benjamin, he came to the literary world’s attention with his memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), which focuses on his estranged relationship with his deceased father. His next work of fiction, City of Glass (1985), began his New York Trilogy, Auster’s most well-known and beloved work. Each of the three novellas in the New York Trilogy uses subverted detective fiction tropes to explore concepts of language, reality, and identity. In addition to memoir and fiction, he also wrote poetry, essays, and wrote and/or directed four independent arthouse films, including Smoke (1995), starring Harvey Keitel, and Lulu on the Bridge (1998), which he co-wrote and directed with Vanessa Redgrave (“Paul Auster, Famed Novelist Known for ‘The New York Trilogy’ and ‘4 3 2 1,’ Dies at 77.” NBC News, 1 May 2024).
Auster’s work is part of the American postmodernist tradition. He often plays with elements of autobiographical detail within fictional worlds and references to writers and writing, thus calling into question the division between reality and fiction, self and story. He has been dubbed “dean of American post-modernists” and “the most meta of American meta-fictional writers” (“Paul Auster, Famed Novelist”). His final and most ambitious work, 4 3 2 1 (2017), is an 800-page novel that explores four different parallel versions of the same man’s life, and was a finalist for the Booker Prize. He died April 30, 2024, at 77 years old, from lung cancer.
Literary Context: Postmodern Literature
City of Glass and the New York Trilogy are part of the postmodern literary movement, which is itself an extension of philosophical theories of postmodernism. Postmodernism has three forms. The first is theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the philosophy and critical theory work of thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard (particularly in his work The Postmodern Condition) and Jacques Derrida. Theoretical postmodernism arose as a critique against modernism following WWII and challenged long-held assumptions about the existence of objective truth, the unified nature of self and identity, and the universality of Enlightenment values. Postmodernism is also a historical period, spanning from the mid-sixties to the present day, marked by “political, economic, social, cultural and aesthetic features that differentiate it from other eras” (Geyh, Paula E. “Assembling Postmodernism: Experience, Meaning, and the Space In-Between.” College Literature, 2003).
The third form is cultural postmodernism, which includes all artistic expressions such as literature, film, and visual arts. Postmodern literature explores a variety of interrelated themes and concepts. These include: a break from realism in favor of the surreal and indefinable, the fragmentary nature of subjectivity and unreliability of consciousness and narrative, pastiche, intertextuality, and metafiction (i.e., the relationships and layering between texts and stories, and a focus on the constructiveness of narrative itself). Postmodern literature also often features a sense of playfulness, irony, and wordplay, a distortion of time, history, and language, a sense of paranoia, and an exploration of the impact of technology on all areas of life.
Though postmodern literature truly began in the late 1940s and became prevalent in the 1960s and ’70s, with authors like Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle) and Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow), literary critics also point to early texts that predate the movement but include or inspire postmodern elements. For instance, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-1615) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) are both very early novels that highlight their own narrative construction, use unreliable narrators, blur the lines between reality and fiction both for the characters and the readers, and rely on wordplay, innuendo, and humor. Don Quixote is particularly influential to City of Glass, playing a part in character development (the character Paul Auster is engaged in a study of Cervantes’s novel) as well as structure, with Quinn embarking on a similar quest.
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