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In Paul Auster's remarkable City of Glass, the ostensible mystery derives from the book's odd and often strangely humorous working of the detective novel genre. The real mystery, however, is one of confused character identity, the descent of a writer into a labyrinth in which fact and fiction become increasingly difficult to separate.
The city of the title is New York, the only truly constant character in the book, and it is the fate of this city to be walked through and interpreted by the writer Quinn and the philosopher and former convict Stillman.... Always it reflects Quinn's and Stillman's search for arcane truth or psychological peace.
Quinn writes mystery novels under a pseudonym, and as...