Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy

This spectacular graphic adaptation of Auster’s postmodern trilogy, cowritten by Paul Karasik (How to Read Nancy), unites three tales of lonely men seeking meaning into a distilled portrait of the haunted urban soul. The volume opens with a reissue of David Mazzucchelli and Karasik’s 1994 version of City of Glass. New to this edition are Ghosts, drawn by New Yorker cover artist Lorenzo Mattotti (The Crackle of the Frost), and The Locked Room, drawn by Karasik. Quinn, the protagonist of City of Glass, is a widower who writes PI mysteries under a pseudonym, and he sees himself as a “ventriloquist dummy” in this “triad of selves.” Mistakenly hired as a PI, Quinn tracks a mad academic whose study of language sends him down an exegetical vortex. In Ghosts, where the art has a more spectral, brushed look and an illustrated novel layout, another metaphysical detective story plays out when investigator Blue is hired by a mysterious man named White to trail a man named Black—who does nothing but read Thoreau and write. It’s a bleak puzzle that could keep a lycée’s worth of French semioticians happy for a decade. The Locked Room’s art style is more subdued. What initially seems to be a simple tale about a man reconnecting with a childhood friend evolves into an existential revelation, with the narrator declaring that life is just “random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.” This long-anticipated volume was well worth the wait. Agents: (for Auster) Carol Mann, Carol Mann Agency; (for Karasik, Mattotti, and Mazzucchelli) Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Apr.)