SOURCE: “Almanacs of Urban Decay,” in Washington Post Book World, March 28, 1987, p. 11.

In the following review, Bleiler offers positive estimation of The Locked Room and In the Country of Last Things.

In City of Glass, the first volume of The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster wrote of his character Quinn/William Wilson that “what interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories.” This is perhaps also true of Paul Auster.

In The Locked Room, the third volume of the trilogy, Auster builds on Fanshawe (1828), Nathaniel Hawthorne's suppressed first novel, which is a secularization of the demon-lover motif with strong mythic elements. Fanshawe is generally rated a bad book, but it has one interesting point: After rescuing a fair maiden from the fate worse than death, Fanshawe rejects her and a worldly life because of a spiritual...