In the four and a half years since the September 11 attacks, New Yorkers' lives have changed in a number of ways, some obvious and predictable, others not so much.

Even as we go about our daily business we're conscious, of course, of the potential for an attack at any time. Naturally we're inclined to think "terrorism" whenever there's a sudden infrastructure problem such as a power outage. And we'll never look at our firefighters in quite the same way again.

But another change has crept up on me in the past couple of years: a change in my life as an audience — as a watcher of movies, a collector of TV shows on DVD, and above all, as a reader of books.

As it turns out, 9/11 has drawn an indelible line across the modern storytelling oeuvre. Works composed before the event differ from those composed after, not necessarily in their content, or even in any inherent quality, but in the light in which — or shadow under which — I will read them.

I don't read a great many new novels, but I did read Nicholas Rinaldi's New York tale Between Two Rivers, published in 2004. Only a small part of the book dealt directly with the attacks, but the whole story seemed suffused in a consciousness of destruction, of endings. Just as a New York apartment is classified as pre- or postwar, so must a New York novel now be called pre- or post-9/11. Rinaldi's was the first post-9/11 novel I read.

Just today I picked up a copy of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy. Auster is one of those writers I have always intended to read but never gotten around to, mostly because I'm very contrary in my reading habits and hate to be reading what everybody else is. (I resisted The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy precisely because all my college buddies were going apeshit over it; and to this day I haven't read the damn thing. My loss, I suppose.)

Still, Auster has always seemed an obvious choice on whom to spend some of my limited novel-reading time. Local not only to New York, but to my own Brooklyn neighborhood, usually featured prominently on the "Local Authors" shelf of the Barnes and Noble stores around here, he is also considered a Major Literary Author on a national scale.

So, picking up the book, which was written in the mid-to-late 1980s, I read the intriguing first sentence:

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.