Sunday 11.15.2009 | 4:23 AM EST

Paul Auster’s Brainy Noir
for Lonely New Yorkers

PAUL AUSTER
:
New York Trilogy | Moon Palace | Hand to Mouth | Leviathan | The Music of Chance
Pretty soon after we (the Royal we, you know, the editorial) had moved to New York and secured suitable living quarters on Clinton Street (not the Leonard Cohen version, you know, the Brooklyn one), friend Ben Niles suggested I read New York Trilogy. Boy Benny, you sure know how to welcome a friend to a dark and lonely place. In a good way.

I’d loved Auster’s own screen adaptation of The Music of Chance, a fantastic little gambling film that plays like the best of David Mamet’s clipped paranoid rants. Auster deals in themes of coincidence, serendipity, loneliness, loss and the search for the self. How very existentialist. Indeed, his noir tales read like Camus dashing out pulp detective fiction. Great fodder for rainy winter days when your sense of self has slipped out of your pocket, lost between the couch cushions.

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