“It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am.” So begins The Locked Room, Paul Auster’s final novel in his New York Trilogy (City of Glass is Volume 1 and Ghosts is Volume 2) wherein an unnamed first person narrator tells the tale using the simple, straightforward language of detective fiction. In this way, the novel makes for easy peasy, enjoyable reading.
But underneath this hard-boiled linguistic skin, oh my goodness, we encounter the narrator, a writer by profession, navigating the choppy waters of passion and commitment, forever brooding on an entire range of topics: life and death, self and other, childhood and memory, friendship and fatherhood, love and hate, reading and writing, self-definition and self-identity.
In a strange, offbeat way, all the philosophic reflections and ruminations give Auster’s short novel an irresistible drive. Fanshawe was a writer, leaving boxes of novels, journals, poetry and plays to be read and judged. Fanshawe also leaves his beautiful wife, Sophie, and his baby boy. Sophie contacts the narrator, who was Fanshawe’s dearest friend, to do the reading and judging. To tell more than these few facts would be to tell too much. Let me simply say that once I started reading The Locked Room, I couldn’t put it down.
American author Paul Auster, born 1947
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