Containing graphic adaptations of City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room.
When I was in my 20s, I dated a guy who loved Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. Those weren’t the reasons I dumped him, but they should have been signs. And it’s not like I didn’t try my darnedest either! I did get some enjoyment out of the Murakami I read, but bounced right off of Paul Auster’s pretentious ass. And you know what, pretentious isn’t the worst thing in the world. Trouble is, Mr Auster’s fiction was guilty of a far greater crime, IMO: being clinically boring. With so many books and so little time, I was pretty sure I wasn’t missing out by skipping any more of his work after City of Glass.
Smash cut to the present, where I’m contemplating a graphic novel version of the three books in Paul Auster’s The New York trilogy. I’d recently read and deeply enjoyed Manu Larcenet’s graphic novel adaptation of a book I loathed, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Could the acclaimed trio of illustrators here do the same for my opinion of Mr Auster’s works?
Yes and no. Using illustrations to transmit much of the story instead of forcing me to endure the entirety of Mr Auster’s prose stylings certainly helped make the experience less tedious for me. And each artist does a terrific job with the material he has, keeping me gripped from first page to last. Their art keeps the narrative moving in a way that the stories, unfortunately, do not.
What’s weird is that I love metafiction! I love Borges and Calvino! Sara Gran’s Little Mysteries is by far one of my favorite books of 2025. But what all those authors have in common is the ability to tell a compelling story which, frankly, none of the books in The New York trilogy are. In addition to that, they’re each cursed with the Eight Deadly Words: I cared about none of these characters.
The artists here do their best. Working in black and white, they each bring a signature style to their assigned stories. While I probably enjoyed the art of David Mazzucchelli’s City Of Glass adaptation the most, I felt like Paul Karasik’s work on The Locked Room was the most inventive. Which is not at all a slight on Lorenzo Mattotti, whose illustrations of Ghosts are so much more interesting than the text itself. But there’s really only so much you can do to retain a reader’s interest when the stories themselves are so meh.
As a non-fan of Mr Auster’s I thought this volume was readable, accessible and interesting. The art was great, and I’d read anything of Messrs Mazzucchelli, Mattotti and Karasik’s again! I thought the art elevated the prose as far as it could, in a beautiful volume that is a visual feast. That luxe quality alone should merit it a place on the shelf of any fans of Mr Auster too.
Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy by Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti & David Mazzucchelli was published April 8 2025 by Pantheon and is available from all good booksellers, including
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire
2 comments
Eight Deadly Words ftw! Here’s what I wrote about City of Glass back when the Munich newspaper branched into book publishing and put out inexpensive hardback editions of a bunch of 20th-century novels:
Paul Auster, City of Glass. Supposedly a meditation on language and identity in the Big City, but in the event just tiresome. Maybe in the mid-1980s its form was innovative; I doubt it. How many times does one have to encounter the device of inserting the author into the fiction before it becomes tiresome? For me the answer was twice, and I read both of them more than a decade before I read City of Glass. Once the initial tricks had been played out and this novel was plodding along, the only interesting question was whether the main character will have an affair with the only female character. He doesn’t. Not quite as bad as the Handke book, but not time well spent.
Author
Truly mystifying how so many people rate the source material. I wonder if it has something to do with how self-conscious it all feels, like the author obviously thinks he’s better than the mystery genre but will deign to uplift it with his take /eyeroll/