Will's Students -- Brennan

[Andrew Clarke Walser]

	Kathleen --
	One could, like a detective, follow the names PAUL and AUSTER
through Paul Auster's oeuvre. 
        PAUL Benjamin AUSTER writes poetry, essays, articles, a memoir,
screenplays, stories, and, of course, novels -- one of which, CITY OF
GLASS, contains a character called PAUL AUSTER, a friend of the unnamed
narrator and an acquaintance of Daniel Quinn, the book's central figure. 
Although the real AUSTER has written a detective novel entitled SQUEEZE
PLAY under the pseudonym PAUL Benjamin, the fictional AUSTER does only
literary work; Quinn, on the other hand, does NO literary work, and has
written a detective novel entitled SUICIDE SQUEEZE under the pseudonym
William Wilson. 
        After Daniel Quinn meets Daniel AUSTER, son of the fictional Paul,
the boy takes his leave with the words:  "Goodbye, myself!" (GLASS 158). 
He does not speak again -- but the real Daniel AUSTER does appear,
speechlessly, in the movie SMOKE, the screenplay for which his father,
PAUL AUSTER, wrote.  PAUL AUSTER also wrote a fiction called "Auggie
Wren's Christmas Story," which SMOKE attributes to a cigar-smoking
novelist, resident of the Bronx, named PAUL Benjamin. 
	The rest of the NEW YORK TRILOGY and parts of LEVIATHAN -- as you
pointed out -- further complicate matters.  So does THE INVENTION OF
SOLITUDE, which wavers between autobiography and fiction.
	Does Auster have a serious purpose behind all this trickery?  I
suppose he wants to question our notions of "the self" and "the author" --
a typical postmodernist maneuver, admittedly.  Like Thomas Pynchon,
however, Auster writes books that cannot be boiled down to philosophies,
and perhaps these games with names are just a dodge, like those "red
herrings" that James Joyce boasted would keep the critics of ULYSSES busy 
for years.

				Andrew Walser
				University of Illinois-Chicago