Paul Auster: City of glass

First published in 1985, City of Glass was the first and best of the three tales that made up The New York Trilogy, a literary detective collection which, even two decades later, still ranks as Timbuktu and Book of Illusions author Paul Auster's most celebrated work.

This comic-book adaptation by former Raw magazine editor Paul Karasik and erstwhile Batman/Daredevil artist David Mazzucchelli was conceived by Pulitzer Prize-winning comic creator Art Spiegelman (Maus, In The Shadow of No Towers) as an attempt to give the then-burgeoning graphic novel form some much-needed literary credibility by recruiting respected novelists such as Auster to write novella-length comic books that involved mature themes but no superheroes.

City of Glass, the comic-book version, was first published in America in 1994 as

the one and only instalment of a line of urban noir-inflected graphic novels but, unfortunately, it has been out of print ever since. Therefore, this revised edition, which includes a new introduction by Spiegelman, is most welcome.

Despite its title, City of Glass is more about life on the streets than in any towering glass skyscraper. Like the main character of Auster's most recent novel, Oracle Night, Daniel Quinn, the central protagonist of City of Glass is also a once-leading writer, now fallen on hard times. Formerly a prolific poet, Quinn lost his muse after the death of his wife and child and now turns out mystery potboilers under the pen name, William Wilson.

Quinn is awakened from his funk by a series of misplaced phone calls, demanding to speak to the Paul Auster detective agency. Eventually, he takes the bait and claims that he is "the one who calls himself Auster".

He attempts to protect the reclusive Peter Stillman from his father, who purports to have invented a new language which allows people to talk directly with God, but is drawn into a murderous web of intrigue, confused identity and uncanny coincidence from which he cannot extract himself.

As Spiegelman notes, Karasik and Mazzacchelli have created "a strange doppelganger of the original book. It's as if Quinn, confronted with two nearly identical Peter Stillmans at Grand Central Station, chose to follow one drawn with brush and ink rather than one set in type".

Karasik and Mazzucchelli bring Auster's distinctive vision of New York to life by cleverly utilising the common ground of comics and maps — adopting a tight, nine-panel grid which evokes the city's dense and frequently overwhelming labyrinthine network of streets. City of Glass is not so much a replacement for the prose version but is instead an impressive supplement to The New York Trilogy.

* Stephen Jewell is an Auckland journalist.
* Faber & Faber, $35