The Investigation by Stanislaw Lem

“Maybe even God only exists from time to time,” the Chief Inspector added quietly. He had leaned forward, and with his face averted was listening attentively to what Gregory was spewing forth with such difficulty from deep inside himself.

“Maybe,” Gregory replied indifferently, “But the gaps in his existence are very wide, as you know.”

Inspector Gregory is called upon by Scotland Yard to investigate a strange series of crimes--corpses are disappearing from their caskets, only to be found a short ways away, the twist being that a few of them have been spotted in transit. In short, is this a case of prankish grave robbery, or are they something stranger and more destabilizing: a sort of resurrection?

The summary makes The Investigation sound like a horror story, or perhaps an existential detective novel in the vein of New York Trilogy or Death in Her Hands. And it is, in some ways, both of those things. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that, like in those two novels, the “crimes” such as they are, are never solved and the investigators undergo an identity crisis. Nor can it really be surprising that some parts are very creepy: a reel to reel recording of a witness dying as he spends his last breaths describing a writhing corpse; Gregory’s dream of his landlord as a puppet master who contacts the dead through his manipulation of a pair of mannequins; an interview with Sciss, a police statistician(?) that devolves into a strange psychosexual encounter complete with mysterious negative depicting snuff films.

Spoilers follow, to the extent that this can be spoiled.

The climax, no less unsettling for its predictability, sees Gregory, whose entire life has slowly been consumed by the case and its myriad unprovable causes--a psychopath, a virus, alien technology, God--given a plausible explanation by his chief, an explanation that posits a trucker who’s been slowly driven mad by driving through the foggy winter nights. He protests, he points out the facts that don’t fit the explanation, he protests about the arbitrary nature of it all; ultimately though, he accepts it, because to not do so would upset the constructions that allow Scotland Yard, religion, government, human relationships, et al, and the premise that lies behind it all: that there is some concrete meaning in the world, and that we can discover and  comprehend it. That actions can be explained, crimes solved, and corpses safely assumed to be dead.

And yet, the book as a whole is somewhat inert, consisting largely of long conversations between various detectives, officers, scientists, and doctors. Entire chapters pass with no real action, and many of the characters outside of Gregory, Sciss, and the Landlord blur together so that much of the book reads more like a philosophical dialogue than a novel. Outside of Gregory’s increasingly emotive responses (he’s always angry, confused, certain), his descent into obsession lacks the texture than makes New York Stories work so well, and the pathos Moshfegh gives the widow in Death in Her Hands. In spite of its compelling big ideas and exciting final quarter, I found this, my first Lem, to be underwhelming--but I’m still looking forward to reading more.

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton

"I am too tangled up in the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right."

I pulled this book off a bookshelf at my girlfriend's parents house, thinking that it might have been the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock movie with the same title. The author's name was not displayed on the side. I was delightfully surprised to see that it was a Chesterton book, and one that I had not heard of. I quickly stuffed it down the back of my pants.

As I suspected upon discovering its author, this book has no connection to the Alfred Hitchcock movie, other than the title. It is a collection of 8 detective stories set in the early 20th century. The title refers to Horne Fisher, a man who is burdened with private knowledge of public figures in England, due to the fact that he is so well connected. Fisher's intimate knowledge of the lives and motivations of members of Britain's upper class allows him to understand what is really going on, and what it ultimately kept from the public.

Accompanying Fisher in these stories is his friend Harold March--they meet in the first story. March is a journalist whose focus appears to be matters of politics. March does not figure heavily into the stories. However, his presence provides the opportunity for Fisher to voice some of the paradoxes he is facing as a result of what he know. Fisher knows who is guilty, but he also knows the motives behind their actions. And there are reasons why these persons cannot be brought to justice--at least in the traditional sense. Inherent to these stories, is a lack of justice. This is the fundamental difference between these stories and Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries.

While there is not a strict chronology to these stories, there is an overall arc to the collection, beginning with Fisher meeting March in the first story. They should definitely be read in the order.

The Return by Roberto Bolano

If The Return is to be our primer on Roberto Bolano, then we may come to find that he has a fondness for three types: the murderer, the detective, and the porn star. The last of these is the most interesting by degrees, though perhaps by default--Bolano possesses little insight into a killer's psychology, and no one has said anything remotely interesting about detectives since Raymond Chandler.

Naturally then, the best of the stories collected here is "Joanna Silvestri," about the eponymous porn starlet reconnecting with a now aging, somewhat destitute John Holmes. "Jack" has a sort of otherworldly presence:

...I know really photogenic girls who lose it as soon as they start a blow job, they look terrible, maybe because they're too into it, but I like to keep my face looking good. So my mind was on the job and, anyway, because of the position I was in, I couldn't see what was happening around me, while Bull and Shane, who were on their knees, but upright, heads raised, they saw that Jack had just come in, and their cocks got harder almost straightaway, and it wasn't just Bull and Shane who reacted, the director, Randy Cash, and Danny Lo Bello and his wife and Robbie and Ronnie and the technicians and everyone, I think, except for the cameraman, Jacinto Ventura, who was a bright, cheerful kid and a true professional, he literally couldn't take his eyes off the scene he was filming, everyone except for him reacted in some way to Jack's unexpected presence, and a silence fell over the set, not a heavy silence, not the kind that foreshadows bad news, but a luminous silence, so to speak, the silence of water falling in slow motion, and I sensed the silence and thought it must have been because I was feeling so good, because of those beautiful California days, but I also sensed something indecipherable approaching, announced by the rhythmic bumping of Shane's hips on my butt, by Bull's gentle thrusting in my mouth, and then I knew that something was happening on the set, though I didn't look up, and I knew that what was happening involved and revolved around me; it was as if reality had been torn, ripped open from one end to the other, like in those operations that leave a scar from neck to groin, a broad, rough, hard scar, but I hung on and kept concentrating till Shane took his cock out and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face.

I must apologize twice over: Once for the length of that passage, and once again for its filthiness. It is, however, the emotional crux of this collection, not least because in so much of the rest of it emotion is wanting. Crude as it is, Bolano's ironic sense is ebullient here. There is the great disparity between the "lowness" of the act and the angelic luminescence of Jack's presence; the comparison (which feminists have made before, with sterner faces) between the sex act and the violence or surgery; the too-perfect porn names like "Shane" and "Bull" and "Robbie and Ronnie." And best of all there is the way this impossibly long sentence, like the sudden withering of the organs it describes, limps lamely to the finish: "Shane took his cock out and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face." In the presence of a greater connection, physical touch seems ridiculous.

But Bolano's vices get the better of him: Joanna is thinking all this while being interrogated by a detective, who doesn't care about Jack Holmes. He's looking for information about a minor player in the pornographic world that has no relevance whatsoever to the narrative. So why do it?

Probably because Bolano was obsessed with the "secret story"--the answers to the questions that are left unasked. What the detective wants to know is likely important to him, but to Joanna (and Bolano, and us, by extension) it is irrelevant to the point of incongruity. The stories in The Return have a glancing-off quality to them, the relevance of parts to the whole is left explicitly absent. But there are better ways to do this than to populate stories with cast-offs from Allen Ginsberg, Quentin Tarantino, Chandler and Tom Waits. It is difficult to shake the feeling that The Return is peopled by detectives, criminals, mobsters, and prostitutes because they signify grit. And The Return is gritty all right, ground down by Bolano's style into flat, gray sand:

Bedloe's face was a blood-spattered mask, garish in the light of the living room. Where his nose had been there was just a bleeding pulp. I checked to see if his heart was beating. The women were watching me without making the slightest movement. He's dead, I said. Before I went out onto the porch, I heard one of them sigh. I smoked a cigarette looking at the stars, thinking about how I'd explain it to the authorities in town.

This is unconscionably lazy. Comparing a face to a mask; "bleeding pulp;" the cinematic pulse-check followed by the the words "He's dead." If all the hack writers in all the world put their minds together, could they come up with a sentence more cliched than "I smoked a cigarette looking at the stars, thinking about how I'd explain it to the authorities in town?"

Too often Bolano wants this kind of empty cool to do his work for him. There are fleeting moments of brilliance, like the first sentences of the title story: "I have good news and band news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac." But they are deflected by nonsense like: "Pavlov was waiting for me by the fireplace, reading and drinking cognac. Before I could say anything he smashed his fist into my nose. I hardly felt the blow but I let myself fall anyway. Don't stain my carpet, I heard him say."

Danny liked this book considerably, and though it hurts my sense of honor to say anything too negative about books that are lent to me, I think the best I can say on this one is "mixed results." It seems unlikely that I will try to tackle 2666 any time soon.

In the Woods by Tana French

My mind sideslipped and spun. Every step set recognition thrumming in the air around me, like Morse code beating along a frequency just too high to catch. We had run here, scrambling sure-footed down the hillside along the web of faint trails; we had eaten streaky little crab apples from the twisted tree, and when I looked up into the whirl of leaves I almost expected to see us there, clinging to branches like young jungle cats and staring back. At the fringe of one of these tiny clearing (long grass, sun-dapples, clouds of ragwort and Queen’s Anne lace) we had watched as Jonathan and his friends held Sandra down. Somewhere, maybe in the exact spot where I was standing, the wood had shivered and cracked open, and Peter and Jamie had slipped away.

First things first: READ THIS BOOK. I’ve never felt more comfortable recommending a story to anyone who’ll listen to me. Really, no matter what kind of reader you are, I bet you’ll thoroughly enjoy In the Woods by Tana French.

In the Woods is a police procedural novel set in present day Dublin. The protagonist and narrator, Rob Ryan, finds himself investigating the murder of 12-year-old Katy Devlin of Knocknaree. Ryan must solve the case without alerting his superiors to his personal connection to the case. 20 years earlier, Ryan and two of his friends went missing in the woods of Knocknaree. A police search eventually turned up the twelve-year-old Ryan, wide-eyed with blood-filled sneakers and mysterious scratches on his person. His two playmates were never recovered. Now Ryan must discover why Katy was found bludgeoned to death on an ancient Druid sacrificial altar just outside the very woods where he lost his friends.

I’ve never been a big crime drama type guy. Law and Order doesn’t really do it or me and I could never get into the hundreds of James Patterson and John Sanford crime thrillers that stock my mom’s bookshelf. And really that’s exactly what In the Woods is, a standard police procedural: Someone commits a crime. The detectives investigate the crime. They find their suspect! But wait, they were all wrong! Dead end. Eureka! A new suspect! Crime solved. I don’t say this to take away from the narrative itself. In fact, Woods has a really interesting plot with some good red-herrings and twists thrown in. But the story itself is far from ground-breaking. One thing about the plot, though, that was particularly well done was the subliminally supernatural tone. Nothing about Katy’s murder or any of the investigation lead you to believe that this is a Stephen King-type story with a monster on the loose. But certain details of Ryan’s friends abduction and his rescue keep that window slightly ajar. As if you wouldn’t be totally shocked if the story ended with some sort of werewolf conspiracy (which it sadly does not).

No, the beauty of In the Woods is all in French’s style. Her dialogue is fresh and realistic. There’s none of the melodramatic, hard-boiled bull-crap you almost expect to get in a crime drama. Or perhaps that’s that fair to say. You get a lot of the stuff you expect in a crime drama. Good cop, bad cop. Commanding officers behind desks questioning tactics and threatening to “take your gun and badge so quickly your head will spin.” Interrogation room scenes with jumpy suspects. The more I think back on it, the more cliché a number of things in the story were. I think the genius is in French’s ability to show you those clichés through the eyes of a player fully aware of those clichés. Ryan and his partners just come across as completely normal people who play the role of ‘television cop” when they find it necessary. Ryan explains his quick rise from uniformed officer to detective as having occurred because “he looked the part.” French’s characters are all too aware of the stereotypes and caricatures of police officers. And unlike the characters of so many other crime novels, they only use them to their advantage. They don’t live them.

I also enjoyed French’s uses of pop-culture references. A lot of times, things like that strike me as annoying for forced. As if the writer is trying too hard to relate to the reader. Maybe other’s will feel that way about French’s writing, but to me it just felt natural. Every random Simpsons or South Park reference felt appropriate. The detectives skipping lunch to play Worms on their computers or getting hammered and playing Cranium succeeded in making these characters seem flesh and blood. The way they talked and interacted after-hours reminded me of my friends.

As I’m sure you’ve already distilled, I loved In the Woods. It’s an exciting story from a new author that I think people are really going to enjoy. The plot/conclusion is nothing mind-blowing but it captures your interest enough for you to enjoy French’s dry sense of humor and smart dialogue. I’m already looking forward to reading French’s next book, whatever that may be.

Highlights: The hint of the supernatural, French’s dialogue, the cultural references

Lowlights: The ending was a little ho-hum, with too many questions left unanswered.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

"As you are well aware," the man continued, his voice soft but penetrating, "in the course of life we experience many kinds of pain. Pains of the body and pains of the heart. I know I have experienced pain in many different forms in my life, and I'm sure you have too. In most cases, though, I'm sure you've found it very difficult to convey the truth of that pain to another person: to explain it in words. People say that only they themselves can understand the pain they are feeling. But is this true? I for one do not believe that it is. If, before our eyes, we see someone who is truly suffering, we do sometimes feel his suffering and pain as our own. This is the power of empathy. Am I making myself clear?"

I wish I knew where to start to talk about The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is, at least in my opinion, incredibly hard to wrap my mind around this story. I told Chris, when I had about 100 pages left to read, that Wind-Up might just become my favorite book. I can say now that this did not turn out to be the case. The ending left too many mysteries unsolved, even unaddressed. Although looking back, I don't know how I could have imagined the story to play out any other way.

Wind-Up's plot is far too complex for me to do any justice here, but I'll try to give the the briefest description possible for a tale this intricate. Our hero, Toru Okada, isliving in Japan with his wife, Kumiko. Toru learns from Kumiko that their house cat has gone missing. Toru, now left with little to occupy himself after quitting his job, goes looking for the beloved pet. Upon commencing the search, however, Toru finds himself trapped in a series of bizarre events involving his wife, their cat, his brother-in law, psychic prostitution, forgotten war crimes, a slightly demented 16-year-old girl, and a strange bird with a bizarre call that no one can actually see. Without giving anything away, the story quicky jumps from the tale of a man searching for his missing cat to that of a man searching for answers to riddles he can hardly comprehend.

As I said, I have a real hard time explaining this book. While it has achieved critical acclaim almost everywhere, there are some that say the story contains hundreds of unnecessary pages filled with anecdotes completely unrelated to the main plot. As I read the story, however, I felt that Wind-Up was essentially a stream of consciousness. Not the stream of consciousness of Haruki Murakami, a professional writer who could more finely tune the story and target its scope on the only matters of conseuence. To me, Wind-Up seemed to be Toru Okada's stream of consciousness, set to type after all the events had transpired. Hardly a novelist himself, it seems logical that Toru's work would be somewhat misguided and dense.

Toru's adventure has the feel of Theseus' journey through the labyrinth. Perhaps more precisely, the book itself has the feel of a labyrinth. Chapters upon chapters are spent taking wrong turns leading to brick walls, forcing the reader to turn around, forget what they just saw. It becomes a struggle to simply search your way back to the point at which you made the wrong turn. This labyrinthal motif is touched upon by Toru himself near the end of the book. Additionally, one of the story's antagonist's name partially translates in english as "Bull." We encounter Bull, or Ushikawa, once Toru finally begins to approach the center of his dark, twisted labyrinth. Perhaps it's a bit too simplistic to describe Wind-Up as a maze, though. Mazes usually have an exit. Wind-Up's maze seems to only have more entrances. More devices to trick you into thinking that escape is just around the corner, when it is actually far out of reach. In hindsight, maybe Toru's adventure is less like Theseus' and more like one of the innocent Athenians who met their end in the harsh maze.

I certainly enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, although I have a hard time explaining why. Murakami's writing style is addictive in his ability to write about extremely complex and bizarre concepts in an unbelievably accessible way. The book has a heavy, dense feel to it at 600 pages. But there's something about the way Murakami strings together words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters. The pages simply melt together and before you know it, you're halfway through the book. This may sound like I'm trying to describe it as "A real page turner!" or saying "I couldn't put it down!" but its more than that. For example, Murakami goes from describing a sub attack on a passenger liner to a massacre at a Manchurian zoo in a single chapter that flows together so perfectly its as if the entire tale was told on a single page. Coupling that together with the fact that neither the sub attack or the zoo massacre have much to do with the general plot (if there even is one at all) makes Murakami's pacing all the more impressive.

I find myself sitting here with no idea how to tie this up. I feel like I've written 500 words without even saying anything. But then maybe thats exactly the kind of review that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle warrants. Or maybe that's a copout. "I wonder."

Highlights: Murakami has without a doubt, one of the most readable writing styles I've ever been lucky enough to encounter
Lowlights: So many doors left unopened, so many riddles left unsolved. Also it makes me genuinely sad that I don't own a cat named Noburo Wataya.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

I recall that once my favorite English teacher from high school noticed that I was reading Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, a book he admitted to having read but didn't seem to care for. "Well," he said, "I'll say this--the man knows how to spin a good yarn." It wasn't really a compliment, but I think that his sarcasm betrayed a certain notion that plot is somehow subordinate to Big Ideas. Is that notion misguided or justified? I'm not certain--but surely to dismiss Wolfe's plot-making ability as little more than quality weaving is to slight a literary skill too rare in modern literature.

Such is the recorded opinion of Michael Chabon, who admits to missing the "ripping yarns" of the genre fiction of yore. It's in that vein that he delivers The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a hulking Frankenstein's monster cobbled from bits of alternative history, Philip Marlowe novels, and Rothian postmodernism. Though YPU provides enough material philosophical and spiritual for the reader to ruminate upon, it is first and foremost a novel of things happening, meant to be marveled at. Though it may be a fruitless task, I will attempt to synopsize:

The divergence point of Chabon's alt-history is the 1948 death by car crash of Anthony Dimond, representative of the territory of Alaska to Washington. Apparently in our world it was Dimond who squashed Harold Ickes' proposal to create a protected Federal district for the temporary residence of Jews in Sitka, Alaska. In Chabon's world, the proposal passes with Dimond out of the way, and soon millions of Jews are seeking refuge in the Sitka District: The "Frozen Chosen."

Fast forward to 2008, the 60-year anniversary of the settlement, and the expiration date of the agreement, which means that "Reversion" is imminent for the Jewish district and soon most of Alaska's three million Jews will be refugees once again. If that wasn't story enough for you, Chabon layers on top of this the story of Meyer Landsman, a detective investigating a gunshot homicide perpetrated in his own building that seems to have ties to the Verbovers, a powerful and mafia-like Orthodox sect of Jews that live on a nearby island.

If that isn't enough for you, wait! I haven't even mentioned that Landsman's partner is also his cousin and half Tlingit Indian, or that his father was a chess prodigy and his uncle a former police chief disgraced by accusations of embezzlement, or that Landsman left his ex-wife because he couldn't bear dealing with the pain of having convinced her to have an abortion, or that the homicide victim is reputed to have been the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the once-in-a-generation would-be Messiah, or that the victim's death is somehow related to Landsman's sister's death in a plane crash, or that all of this seems to be tied into a shadowy conspiracy cooked up between Alaskan Hasidim and the evangelical United States president to return Israel to Jewish control. Whew. Breathe.

Clearly, The Big Sleep, this is not--Raymond Chandler's tight and careful plotting produced books under 200 pages; Chabon doubles that but stuffs in enough that it would have felt more comfortable at twice that again. But while Chabon hasn't quite got the noir genre's laconicness down pat, he does a good job with Landsman, into whom he funnels as much of Philip Marlowe's personality as is possible. The genius of this lies in the dialogue--I had never made the connection between the kind of rapid-fire quips that characterize noir and the brusque recursiveness of Jewish humor, but there it is. I am reminded of Mastrionotti and Deutsch* from the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink; it is no surprise that it is the Coens who are slated to begin filming YPU early next year.

But back to the book. Reading it feels like traveling through the legendary and labyrinthine Warsaw tunnels which run beneath Sitka, but when you emerge on the other side, what are you left with? For one, you are left with a mess. It's hard not to feel that YPU has a few ideas too many, and some of them could have been left on the cutting-room floor. For another, you are left with the unfortunate conclusion that while you weep for the fate of the Jews, for whom the Disapora comes with a countdown this time around, it is much more difficult to feel pity for the individual characters of this novel, who are drawn a little too broadly and rely a little too heavily on their archetypes.

Thirdly, you may be left with the opinion of Richard Johnson of the New York Post, who titles his Page Six piece "Novelist's Ugly Views of Jews." This is, of course, the Post, which could sensationalize a ham sandwich, but I wish to briefly unpack the criticism here: Mainly Johnson takes issue with the fact that YPU "depicts Jews as constantly in conflict with one another, and its villains are a ruthless, ultra-Orthodox sect that resembles the Lubavitchers." What exactly is Johnson's understanding of Judaism today, that its various sects are friendly in a way that the splinter denominations of Islam and Christianity have failed to be since their inception? In fact, I think that Chabon's depiction of internecine conflict among the Sitka Jews is one of the novel's great successes; in a population of three million Jews with no Palestinians to brush against (though the native Indians serve this position to some extent), isn't it natural that such issues would arise along sectarian and secular lines? Johnson's criticism is pure silliness, and I have not seen it repeated by any respectable source.

And yet, let me bring up something that Johnson does not: One of the most poisonous and absurd claims made about Jews today is that they have extensive control over world institutions like the media and the United States Government. This idea is particularly pervasive in Islamic communities and the controversial specter of it taints even serious academic work, like Mearsheimer and Walt's claims about the undue influence of the Israel Lobby. By presenting a "ripping yarn" in which a cabal of Orthodox Jews plot to undermine the stability of world events, isn't Chabon playing into the hands of such absurdity? And even if the Post is too dim to pick up on it, doesn't that in a way back up their claims that YPU reinforces an ugly stereotype?

That question is more rhetorical than it sounds; I bring up the issue only to bring it up and would probably argue against it in the end. But I do think that it contributes to one aspect that did leave a bad taste in my mouth: YPU, for all its concern with religious issues, seems at times to have a rather uncomplex attitude toward religion in general. Though we might argue about the significance of it, the villains of the novel are conspiratorial Jews--and its heroes are humorous, self-effacing, Woody Allen-like ones--and what's more, they're aided by an amoral and evangelical president who wants to bring on the End Times. Though I understand this is the perception many have of our sitting president, it seems to me to evidence a certain lack of nuance on Chabon's part. There is no worth, I believe, in fiction that does not subvert our expectations, and while Chabon distracts us with the aurora borealis of conceit and plot, the cast lacks the capability to surprise us.

Don't think that I'm not recommending the book, I am--sometimes a good story is good enough. Let us not forget that one of the most powerful people in Jewish Sitka is Itzak Zimbalist, the boundary maven. It is against Jewish law to carry anything across boundaries on the Sabbath, a law circumvented by creating makeshift boundaries with rope, cable or wire around entire communities, and it is the boundary maven who is in charge of keeping this border, the eruv, intact. So do not doubt the power of string, the effectiveness of a "good yarn."

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

The garish cover of the recent Penguin Classics edition of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, drawn by comics veteran Art Spiegel, harkens back to the pulps of the mid-20th century, the ones in which dames are always popping into the darkened offices of private eyes, and the detectives themselves are boiled as hard as anyone can be boiled. And indeed The New York Trilogy is a trio of detective stories in a way, as tightly written as a Raymond Chandler novel, but the searches that occupy the protagonists of these three novellas are circuitous, without solution, circling back on themselves until the possibility of solution has disappeared and the search is all that is left.

The first of these, City of Glass, opens with Quinn, a part-time writer who gets a call for Paul Auster (that's the author's name!), a private eye, begging him to take a case. Eventually, Quinn takes the case despite the case of mistaken identity. His client, Peter Stillman, who gives a long speech that sounds something like the word salad of a schizophrenic, hires Quinn to track down his father, who has just been released from prison and who Stillman thinks is going to try to kill him. The crime for which he was convicted? Locking Peter in a room for nine years as a child in an attempt to discover in isolation man's natural language, the language of God, which will reverse the curse of the Tower of Babel and present the key to understanding all. Here is a passage from City of Glass, where Stillman's father is speaking to Quinn:

"My work is very simple. I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admirably. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible storehouse of shattered things. Each day I g o out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds--from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pulverized to the putrid."

"What do you do with these things?"

"I give them names."

If there is an overarching theme to The New York Trilogy, it is the insufficiency of words to describe the world. Stillman's father combs the streets looking for broken things because he claims that our language is insufficient to describe what happens to an object when it is destroyed beyond use; is an umbrella with no cloth between the spokes still an umbrella? I do not know if Auster is aware of this, but there are cultures all around the world who think in exactly this manner. When this sort of thinking is applied to the detective novel, we come to understand that there is no way for a detective to find what he is looking for if he hasn't the words to describe it. All three of the protagonists in this book are following someone, and they all keep copious notes, but in the end, what good comes from writing it down? Truth remains elusive.

The second and third novellas play like a variation on a theme. Ghosts follows a man named Blue hired by a man named White to watch a man named Black--and all the peripheral characters on down the line are named after colors. This is a wink from Auster, a clue that we are not reading fact but fiction, and that he can create as he sees fit. The suggestion here is that a detective's work is as much to create as it is to discover. In a complicated bit of self-reflexivity, we begin to wonder who is watching whom--and for that matter, who is who. But Ghosts, for the most part, treads too nearly to the same ground as City of Glass while lacking the human connection that Quinn provides.

Much better is the final novella, The Locked Room, a name that mystery enthusiasts will immediately recognize as a type of book or story in which the detective must figure out how a crime was perpetrated in a room that usually would be impossible to enter. But again Auster subverts our expectations; the novella does not begin with a locked room but ends with it; it does not ask how one gets in to the locked room but how to get another man out. (And of course, it must be noted that by ending in a locked room, we have come full circle from the mad experiments of Stillman's father in City of Glass).

In the room is a man named Fanshawe, a brilliant man who disappears and burdens his wife with the task of contacting his childhood friend, the narrator, to read his unpublished novels and judge whether or not they are worthy of publication. The books become a minor hit among critics, but the presence of Fanshawe in the narrator's life begins to complicate his new marriage to Fanshawe's wife. Under the guise of writing a biography, the narrator sets out to find Fanshawe and perhaps take him out of the equation permanently.

Like all the protagonists of The New York Trilogy, he becomes obsessed to the point where the search is all that he can focus on, and it brings him near the brink of destruction. In Auster's world, the detective is forever being forced into a double-bind: by the very nature of knowledge he cannot find what he is looking for, but he cannot simply quit the search. Like Stillman's father picking garbage off of New York streets, we are forced to wonder if you can call a detective who has no ability to detect a detective at all.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I like a good detective story and that is exactly what Doyle delivers in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is nothing like the bespectacled man I remember from Wishbone Classics as a child. He's actually a rather seedy character with an addiction to cocaine and an aversion to law enforcement officers who is described as being "bohemian". In order to do his detective work, he's often breaking just as many laws as the people he's trying to track down. The narrator is Holmes' friend Dr. Watson, an amiable family man who spends his free time helping the detective and sometimes chronicaling their mishaps. (I would like to point out here that prior to writing, Doyle was a doctor.) Watson seems to be a foil for Holmes more than anything else, as he's portrayed as being more stable over all. It's Watson that does the gun toting when things get serious, though-- the only weapon that we see Holmes use at all is a whip. One last character note about our daring detective is that he seems to be another Victorian asexual male hero. The only woman he's interested in at all is Irene Adler-- the one person to ever outsmart him in a case invovling the King of Prussia.

The stories are rather neatly tied together with a neat beginning, middle, and end... the kind of formulaic writing we learn to abide by in our early schooling. The beginnings of each short story are the only really painful things to read, however. You are introduced to Holmes' new client who is in need of his help because their fiance has vanished into thin air, someone is blackmailing them with a photograph, ect. Then Holmes uses his keen observational skills to point out things about the client that only a psychic could know-- for instance, he can tell a woman is a typist because of wear on a certain part of her sleeves. Every time Watson is just shocked at Holmes' attention to detail while I was just yawning.

These stories reminded me quite a bit of Poe's detective fiction, for example "The Murders at Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter". I found Doyle's writing to be more interesting and over all superior by far. Doyle gave the reader a better chance at figuring out the story's quirk along with Holmes, though in some cases, such as "A Case of Identity", he gave a little bit too much away from the start. As today's detective fiction is filled with too many technological gadgets and CSI nonsense, Poe is the only thing I know to compare with this.

I wouldn't recommend the whole book, but I'd at least check out one or two to see what Doyle has to offer. You can do this without buying the book if you go to the website readprint.com, which also has a lot of other classic works that are past the copywrite date now.