The futility of words is an odd theme for a writer to embrace. Yet Auster does it with a vengeance. In City of Glass, the pseudo-detective is called in to to help a man named Peter Stillman. When he meets Stillman and asks for a description of the case (a classic moment in all detective fiction), this is his client’s reply: “If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. ... Long ago there was mother and father. I remember none of that. They say: mother died. Who they are I cannot say. ... No mother, then. Ha ha. Such is my laughter now, my belly burst of mumbo jumbo. Ha ha ha.” And so on, with greater and greater incoherence, for several more pages.

No, this is not some experiment in literary style. Stillman was victimized as a child, kept in isolation by a crazy father for nine years. He never learned to speak normally, and now is fearful that the parent who did this to him, about to be released from incarceration, will come back to exact revenge. Yet the way that Auster turns issues of textual interpretation into a pulp detective tale is highly characteristic of this writer’s peculiar perspective on matters.

The New York Trilogy is very much the quintessential post-modern work of fiction. It is ambiguous and open-ended. Yet the stories also seem closed and almost claustrophobic, with the plots of the three novels turning in on themselves. The book is multi-layered and invites the reader to approach it from many different angles, but also works as straightforward story-telling. Yet Auster’s greatest achievement may be his ability to achieve all this, while staying true to the pacing and narrative build of a detective tale. After all, there are plenty of deep post-modern books, but here is one that is a real page-turner.